Recall that dialogue can be broken down into beats of underlying action and strategy. When speaking, characters have basic strategies that they're trying to play out through the use of words. Paul Gulino asks us to identify these strategies as verbs: "And the kind of verbs you're looking for are things like 'attack', 'defend', 'deflect', 'persuade', 'seduce'. Those are the kind of verbs you want the lines to have. You don't want 'explain' because it's emotionally neutral." In most cases we want to avoid situations where a character is simply driven by a desire to explain or inform. We can, however, make this desire more interesting by making it hard to *want* to do. In his book The Craft of Scene Writing, Jim Mercurio gives this example, "If two cops at a crime scene are dispassionately discussing the murder, even if we are learning about their characters and how they do things, that’s too easy. Whom is it hard for? It could be as simple as having to make them break the news to the spouse of the victim. In fact, what if the victim’s spouse stumbles upon the scene and overhears the cops’ egregiously detached tone and calls them on it? Now, suddenly, the act of explaining the details or relaying information is fraught with tension and conflict." If you've got a character who's going to explain something, make it hard for them to want to do.
In most cases we want to avoid situations where a character is simply driven by a desire to explain or inform. We can, however, make this de
