Importance of Catchphrases in Plays

Video Transcript

STEVE CAVERNO: Steve Caverno on behalf of Expert Village, here to talk to you today about dialogue. Now, we're going to talk about catchphrases. Catchphrases and motifs. So, some of these are things that people might say like, "Believe it or not." "Believe it or not, I was a long distance runner." or "Believe it or not, I have a PhD in Psychology." or something like that, and this can be something that someone repeats. They have--they wanna--they might get pompous. They might have something to say about themselves. So, believe it or not, this is an important element of writing, also--the things that people say, catchphrases. Also, you can have someone constantly saying "believe it or not" and then at end when someone's going to reveal something about them that they know, that this person doesn't think they know, you're going to have them begin with "believe it or not". So, you can have this person constantly saying "believe it or not" and then you can have the detective coming at the end of the play and say, "Believe it or not, I found your fingerprints at the scene of the murder," so that way we take that line that this person has been saying all the time and we turn that against them. This is the way that we bring in lines and we define characters with what they say but then we can also use that against them. We can use that in another character, the way they might tease them. There might be some way where we can create that witty--that crafty dialogue. You might hear probably in the war films or the war theater where you have that interplay and then these are ways we can look at to create that interplay between characters.

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