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edricarica  ·  3496 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are the movies or books that show a story rather than tell it?

    take you're (sic.) talkiest scene and rewrite it entirely without dialog. You'll find a way. It's a useful exercise.

This is excellent advice - it's the best screenwriting exercise I know of.

I'm a film editor. Often we end up doing this in the edit - sometimes because the screenplay ought to have been edited more aggressively, but often because, once you've got the images, you really don't need all those words. It's astonishing how a snippet of a glance from a good actor can replace paragraphs of dialogue.