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214 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
sympathy between the characters and the audience, so that they will be accepted by the audience as being true to real life.
But the screen-play writer cannot write dialogue that is absolutely true to life and expect it to accomplish his purposes. For were he to reproduce the actual speech of average people, the result would be a hodge-podge of halting, half-finished, verbiage. Dialogue would meander down inconsequential bypaths, lose audience interest, and, certainly stray dangerously from the strict but necessary injunction that every word of dialogue must contribute something to the character or plot development to warrant its use.
Realism compromise. Hence the screen-play writer must compromise with what is actual realism in order to achieve an effect of realism that will carry the story forward, develop character, and retain audience interest.
Dialogue selectivity. Once again, this can be accomplished only by creative selectivity. It is absolutely necessary that the screen-play writer possess the ability to eliminate all nonessentials of speech, to highlight only those elements that move the story, actuate the characters, or entertain the audience— to write dialogue, in other words, that does not present actual speech, but rather represents it, realistically and dramatically.
Dialogue ungrammatical. To do this, the writer must always keep in mind the fact that people do not always talk with grammatical precision, even if they are college professors who teach courses in advanced English.
The normal grammatical word order in the English language has the subject come first, the predicate next, and the modifier following. "He walked away."
In the average colloquial speech, however, the word order varies considerably from the grammatical norm. Modifying phrases that would normally come at the end of a sentence are often used as sentence beginnings. "That paper— over there, I mean— bring it to me, will you?"
Use dialogue tags. Colloquial speech is full of little tags and verbal formulas. A study of Joyce's Ulysses— in the interior monologue