IS EVERYONE IN YOUR SCREENPLAY JOHN MALKOVICH?

Here is a cruel little test, take three pages of dialogue and delete the character names. Can you still tell who is speaking? If not, welcome to Being John Malkovich. Malkovich talks to Malkovich about Malkovich while another Malkovich interrupts. Except yours are called Sarah, Ben, Claudia and Detective Inspector Harris. You have not written four people, you have written yourself four times.

Sarah is 34, privately educated and terrified of abandonment. Ben is 57, left school at sixteen and runs a haulage company. Fabulous. Then both start speaking like the person who wrote their biographies. A tragic childhood and a different postcode do not constitute a voice. Life contaminates language. Class, education, geography, profession, generation, family, humiliation, ambition: it all gets in. A surgeon and a mechanic may be equally intelligent, but they have spent thirty years learning completely different ways to understand how things break. If your teenager sounds exactly like her 48-year-old writer, putting a vape in her hand is just costume.

This is where writers panic. Ben gets "mate". Sarah gets "darling". Grandma gets "good heavens". The eccentric one says "marvellous". Someone starts fucking swearing, dialogue has put on a false moustache.

The real voice is underneath, someone raised around anger can detect a two-degree change in the emotional weather and apologise before anyone has accused them of anything. Someone accustomed to power does not ask, "Would you like a coffee?" They say, "We're getting coffee."

The interior designer notices the lighting. The burglar notices the safe. The exhausted mother notices the bed. The accountant wonders who the fuck is paying for this. There, four characters.

People reveal themselves through what they notice. Voice is what their particular brain does with the world.

"How did you feel when your father left?"

"I think I've always carried a deep sense of abandonment which makes it difficult for me to trust."

Has she been kidnapped by her therapist?

"Which time?"

Better.

People are terrible communicators, fortunately, this makes them excellent characters. We evade, lie, misunderstand, show off, sulk, answer questions nobody asked and make jokes at funerals. Even therapy-speak can be characterful. "I'm processing my abandonment trauma" might be profound self-awareness. It might also mean, "Please fuck off, I have learnt terminology."

Sarcasm, absurdity, cruelty, understatement and accidental stupidity come from different brains. Some people use humour as armour. Some use it as a knife. Some aren't funny at all but have somehow failed to receive this information and are currently halfway through an anecdote.

If everybody delivers the same exquisitely constructed quip, congratulations. You're hilarious, but you're also playing the entire cast.

Ask AI to "improve" six characters and watch them migrate towards the same articulate middle. Everyone understands the subtext. Everyone chooses the right word. Everyone responds intelligently. Your 14-year-old schoolgirl, alcoholic grandfather and Albanian hitman have apparently attended the same weekend writing retreat.

People are messier, they choose the wrong word, say too much, say nothing, become pompous when frightened and funny when devastated.

Delete the names, read the scene, still know who is speaking? Good.

No idea? Put the false moustache down.