 My name is Rachel Atkins. I'm a playwright and a teaching artist and this is a lesson to help you to write your own play. In this lesson, we're going to be looking at ways to make your dialogue really powerful, the things that characters say to one another. If you did my last lesson with me, you wrote a scene using really limited dialogue. So today you're going to get to do something new with that scene, adding on to it using these tips. If you didn't do that lesson with me, that's totally fine. You'll still be able to use these tips in your writing. So here are my tips for using really powerful dialogue. Number one, have characters address each other by their names or their titles. So mom, officer, doctor, these things help your audience know who those characters are and what their relationships might be. Number two, use nouns. Be specific. Have your characters say what they're actually talking about, instead of just using pronouns like it or that. I want you to listen to the difference between these two lines and notice what you get by adding more specificity to your language. Version one, can I have that? Version two, mom, could you please pass the maple syrup? Listen again. Can I have that? Mom, could you please pass the maple syrup? Think about what you learn in the second version that you didn't get in the first version. You get a relationship. You get where they might be. You get time of day. You get what they're doing. You even get a little bit of politeness. All of that can be achieved just by being more specific with your language. Tip number three, every line should add new information and raise the stakes. Raising the stakes means you create more tension or you make the situation more important. So for example, if one character says, the volcano is erupting, then the next character should add something on to that information. And the lava has almost reached our house instead of just saying, oh no, or yeah it is. You always want to add more information, especially when you're writing a short play. You want to avoid what I call throwaway lines like yeah or oh no. I call them throwaway lines because they don't tell the audience anything new. You could literally pull those lines out of your script and throw them away and nobody would know the difference. It wouldn't matter to your script. You might also have ideas about what your characters are doing while they're talking. You can add these to your script through stage directions. When you write stage directions in your script, you want to put them in parentheses in the same line as the character's dialogue. You can use stage directions to say how a character is feeling when they're talking. You can also use stage directions to show how to explain what a character is doing while they're talking. If it's how they're feeling or what they're doing while they're speaking, you want to put it at the beginning of the line. So for example, it would say the name of the character colon and then in parentheses you'd have the stage direction and then you'd have their line. So it might say character A in parentheses pointing shocked and then the dialogue. The volcano is erupting and then character B would say the next line. Character B colon parentheses terrified and then their dialogue and the lava has almost reached our house. If you have ideas about what the characters are doing after they speak, you'll put your stage directions at the end of the line. So all of these tips of being more specific in your dialogue, adding new information in your dialogue, using your stage directions to explain how the characters are feeling or what they should be doing, all of these tips can help your writing stronger. Here's a little reminder of everything that I just said. Now that you know all these ways to make your dialogue really clear and strong and specific, you're going to have a chance to revise the scene that you wrote in our last lesson about the $100. Again, if you didn't write that scene, don't worry about it. You can use these same tips for other writing, but if you did write that scene, I want you to use the same thing that you wrote. So you're using the same characters, the same objectives and conflict. Start with the scene that you wrote with that really limited dialogue, but now you have no limits on how many words you can use and you can add as many stage directions as you want. If you are revising the scene that you wrote last time, you should make an adjustment to every line that you wrote that could be using more words in your character's dialogue. It could be adding stage directions. It could be both, but I want to challenge you to try to change every single line in that scene. If you wrote that scene last time by passing the paper back and forth with another writer, if you were doing this lesson with somebody else, you can do this in the same way where you're each still writing from your own character's point of view and you're changing your own character's line. If you wrote it by yourself, great. You're going to do the same thing, representing both characters. And again, if you didn't write that scene or you want to use these ideas to write a new scene, that's fine too. You can use these tips to revise some other kind of writing that you did or to write a brand new scene. It's up to you, but I'm going to stop talking. I'm going to let you go away and write your new scene. When you're done, you should find somebody to read it out loud with you because playwriting is meant to be spoken out loud. It's meant to be heard and not just read on a page. So if you can find someone else to read it with you, great. Even better if you can find two people to read it for you so that you can hear your work and even to hear the difference between the first version and the second version of rewriting, that's terrific. Again, my name is Rachel Atkins. Thank you so much for joining me and I hope to see you in another playwriting lesson.