This week I watched When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail. I’m not going to get into the semantics of how similar they are, structure, blah, blah, blah… but how great is the dialogue? That’s the part that’s the hardest to nail#–characters speaking in an original voice, and saying something you not only identify with, but care about. It’s always "bad" to speak in monologues and tell stories through your characters (or so screenwriting books and classes will tell you) but somehow Nora Ephron pulls it off in a way that makes you just love the character even more.

For example… the scene in You’ve Got Mail where Meg Ryan talks about her childhood and her mother. That’s a death knell in most movies… things would just come to a screeching halt. But the way Nora Ephron handles the language, it works. Now why is it different for her? How does she do it?

There are a bajillion books out there on screenwriting structure, story structure, heros vs. outlaws, etc and so on. But are there any on dialogue? How does a writer develop an ear for dialogue? What gives him or her that distinct ability to capture the essence of a person and distill it onto the page?

I love reading blogs and correspondance, because I’m amazed with the differences in how people choose to communicate their thoughts. I just wish I were better at capturing them for my own purposes.

Which brings up another issue: when reading a blog post on City Wendy I realized how out of touch I am with online slang. One cruise through a myspace.com page and I’m almost totally lost. Really. Just lost. I don’t understand the weird capitalization, spelling, words… it’s like a foreign language. And the sad thing is, I was on the web from the old days… back when you had to telnet and use Gopher. Sigh. I guess it’s impossible to keep up with it all. I wonder if this is how mechanics feel… the ones used to working on a Chevelle and then suddenly a guy in a Mazda comes in with a rotary engine.