Silent, Meaningful Glances
If you read through your entire script out loud, chances are excellent that every single place you stumbled on the dialogue can be cut without hurting the story. Unless you’ll be breathing-for-effect, don’t write dialogue bigger than a single breath can handle.
A lot of people make the mistake of solving things by throwing more dialogue into the script. When we do so, we are buying into the false idea that “writing” is only what the actors say.
I saw the same thing in comics — people seemed to believe that the writer was the person who wrote the words in the word balloons.
It simply never occurs to them that a comic’s writing is the whole story. Same as all those award-winning animated shorts. All those adorable little shorts of birds on telephone wires, or nudging each other on branches, or kids in sandboxes — all of those were written. Yet no dialogue.
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