One Scene With Extra Cheese, Please

Nothing tastes better than Velveeta, the processed food substitute that outcheeses the real thing. And nothing sounds better than a great cheesy movie line. Come on. Admit it. You wait for these cheesy movie lines each time you watch your favorite cheesy movie and you laugh. Or smile. Or give a big "awwwww." It doesn't matter that the lines seem so unrealistic, so contrived, so sometimes out of character. They still work.

"You had me at hello." Did the Renee Z character really get over so easily the way Jerry Maguire jerked her around ? All it took was Jerry remaking the image of some spoiled football star to show her that deep down, he really did have a heart?

"No one puts Baby in the corner!" (one of my blog responders is going by this moniker. Who are you?) Wow, man. Chill. OK, we'll find a better seat for Baby. No, you're not going up on stage to dance, too. You're a wild man. Swayze continues: "I do the last dance every year, and I'm going to do it again this year. Except I'm going to do it my way." (quotes are very much approximated).

"I'm the King of the World." Right, Leo. Tomorrow morning you'll still be with the rest of the hired help. Or going down with a sinking ship.

Even mobster movies aren't exempt. In The Godfather, for example. "Leave the body, take the cannolis." I like cannolis, too, Clemenza, but after you just blew someone's brains out, haven't you lost your appetite just a little bit?

And my favorite, of course. "I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her." World famous movie star Julia Roberts lays this one on a simple British bookshop owner, Hugh Grant, who then turns HER down. Double unrealistic.

Dialogue in movies, drama, and prose, for that matter, isn't always very realistic. Still all of the aforementioned movie lines have their appeal. Good dialogue may sometimes get a little cheesy, but at least it is NOT ordinary. To me, the trick is to write extraordinary, fascinating, or at least, interesting dialogue, and make it SEEM entirely natural for the situation. The pros, in any profession, make the difficult look easy. Barry Bonds hitting a home run. Pavarotti hitting the right notes. When you read, watch drama, film, or TV, listen carefully to the dialogue and then think about what it does. It creates character, conflict, dramatic tension, moves the plot along, and makes us laugh, cry, and get angry. It sounds real although we know it's completed fabricated. It bears many burdens. It's hard work. That's why writing dialogue makes or breaks a good story. Even if it IS a little heavy on the fromage.

Feel free to leave me some fresh cheese in the comments.