What characters have to say. The creation of dialogues using William Layton's methodology

Abstract

Dialogue creation is an essential phase of audiovisual scriptwriting. This article explains William Layton's dramatic texts analysis system originally aimed at acting performance, and applies it to the writing of audiovisual dialogues. It also explains how students of a Master's degree in screenwriting have been trained in this system and shows its usefulness for creating dialogues by means of a survey applied to 85 students from different classes. Of these, 59% had previous training or experience in audiovisuals. Before learning about the Layton method, only 9% of the sample used other techniques to create dialogues and 50% knew generic advice that would guide the design of their characters' conversations. The fact is that technical or academic monographs on screenwriting do not offer systematic methodologies that allow aspiring screenwriters to get started in dialogue writing, but they only provide recommendations. By disseminating this technique for the creation of audiovisual dialogues, this article aims to help prevent this lack of systematic methodologies from being transferred to training programs. Participants confirm that this method favors synthesis (84%) and pre-planning of the dialogues and the functionality of each sentence of the characters (91%), allowing them to better adapt to their psychosocial characterization (94%) or moment of the dramatic arc (95%). Eighty-five percent of the respondents continue to use it in their professional life as scriptwriters after completing their training or state that they pass it on in their classes when they work as teachers.