The silent scene exercise: tell a story with no dialogue

Sooner or later, most screenwriting courses hand you the same constraint: write a scene where nobody speaks. This post covers where the exercise comes from, what it trains, which films to study, and how to write action lines that carry feeling without camera directions or thoughts nobody can film.

Why courses take the dialogue away first

Look at a few published syllabi and a pattern shows up: silence comes first, talk comes later. The exercise shows up everywhere from a classroom activity sheet to university screenwriting workshops, and the course materials describe it in plain terms.

The USC CTWR 505 syllabus explains the order. The course begins with "visualization, the concept of telling a story with pictures", and students learn to show a character's inner life "without dialogue by using planting and payoff, action and activity, location, props, costume, atmosphere and motivation". Dialogue arrives "in a second stage of exercises". The UCCS course is built the same way. Its first act is called "Writing without words", and the second is called "People can talk?"

Outside universities, Writers Write publishes a free visual storytelling course by the screenwriter Anthony Ehlers: 14 lessons and 30 exercises. The same instinct shows up in one-line form too. No Film School puts "Silent Scene" first in its list of exercises, and Scriptshadow once challenged its readers to show a woman falling in love at first sight, with the one rule that "the scene can't have any dialogue."

What the constraint actually trains

Take away dialogue and three things have to be visible:

• The want. If a character can't say what they want, they have to go after it. The USC CTWR 505 prompt is built on this: a character who "WANTS something and makes an effort to get it".
• The obstacle. It has to be something in the room: a locked door, a queue, another person's back, a clock.
• The change. By the end, something we can see is different: an object gone, a posture, a door that's open now.

The constraint also forces you to set things up. The USC CTWR 412 before-and-after-the-date drill and the CTWR 505 "Roommates" exercise both ask you to show one space twice, or three times. The CTWR 505 syllabus notes that "the elements in the second part ought to be planted in the first part". If the flowers are on the table at 7 p.m. and in the bin at midnight, you don't need a line of dialogue to explain the date.

There's a longer-term payoff too. In a Script Magazine interview, commercials director Andy Lambert said the scripts for his wordless MUTE shorts "tend to be just under a page long", and that "if they go beyond a page, I know something is wrong." A silent script shows its padding at once, and learning to spot padding is useful in every script you write.

Study these before you write

Watch each one with the sound down first. Write one line per beat of action, then count the beats.

Up: the "Married Life" montage

Pete Docter directed Up (2009), and Bob Peterson and Docter wrote it, according to Wikipedia's film page. The opening montage is known by the title of Michael Giacchino's cue, "Married Life". It covers Carl and Ellie's whole marriage without a word. The part worth learning from is how it got that way. /Film reports that the montage first had dialogue, and that storyboard artist Ronnie del Carmen suggested letting the score carry it. Docter said: "I kept pushing to see how much we could take out, and discovered that it seemed like the less we had the more emotional it felt." He told Rotten Tomatoes that the sequence came down to "about four-and-a-half minutes". So one of the best-known wordless sequences in animation started out with dialogue, and it got better when the talk was cut.

WALL·E: the Earth section

Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon wrote the screenplay. Wikipedia notes that the film "has minimal dialogue in its early sequences" and that its robots "communicate with body language and robotic sounds". The story and animation crews watched a Buster Keaton and a Charlie Chaplin film "every day for almost a year". The AFI Catalog entry adds a detail worth copying: a hand-holding shot from Hello, Dolly! becomes WALL·E's way of saying "I love you". One object carries a whole line of dialogue.

There Will Be Blood: the prologue

Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed the film, loosely basing it on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!. Its opening follows Daniel Plainview prospecting alone in 1898, according to Wikipedia. The KPBS review says that "the first fifteen minutes of the film contain no dialogue", and StudioBinder puts the first seven pages of the screenplay at zero dialogue. Watch it for character: long before Plainview talks, we've seen how far he'll go.

Three more worth your time

• Rififi (1955). Jules Dassin's film centres on "an intricate half-hour heist scene... shot in near silence, without dialogue or music" (Wikipedia). It's a masterclass in suspense through procedure.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Hush" (1999). Joss Whedon wrote and directed it after reading critics praise the show's dialogue as its most successful aspect. Wikipedia notes that "only about 17 minutes of dialogue" is in the 44-minute episode. It's the one TV example here, and the only episode of the series nominated for an Emmy for writing.
• Locks. The USC CTWR 505 syllabus sets Ryan Coogler's short as viewing in the same homework as the no-dialogue assignment.

The exercise, in three sizes

Pick the size that fits the time you have. The deliverables are what the courses above ask for, scaled to one writer.

Before you write a line, answer these on a card:

1. Want: what does the character want in the next few minutes?
2. Obstacle: what in the room is in the way?
3. First image: what do we see before anything happens?
4. Last image: what's different, and can we see the difference?
5. Three objects the story will pass through, and one sound.

ScripTao is a free screenwriting app that runs in your browser, needs no sign-up and keeps your work in your browser. The box below opens a blank page for this exercise, and its header tracks how much of the page is dialogue.

A worked example

Here's a bad first draft of a one-page silent scene. It's the kind of draft almost everyone writes first:

INT. NORA'S CAR - HOSPITAL CAR PARK - NIGHT

We see Nora sitting in her car. She is devastated because the scan results were bad. She thinks about her son and how she will tell him. CLOSE ON her face as she finally decides to be brave.

Nothing in that paragraph can be filmed. "We see" and "CLOSE ON" are camera directions. "Devastated because the scan results were bad" is backstory, and "thinks about her son" and "decides to be brave" are thoughts. An actor can't play "because". Here's the rewrite:

INT. NORA'S CAR - HOSPITAL CAR PARK - NIGHT

NORA (50s) sits behind the wheel, engine off, coat still buttoned. A hospital envelope on the passenger seat.

She puts the key in the ignition. Doesn't turn it.

Her phone buzzes on the dash. A photo fills the screen: a teenage boy pulling a face. She lets it buzz until it stops.

She takes the letter out. Folds it in half. In half again. Again, until it won't fold. She pushes it deep into the glove box and shuts it.

Across the car park, an OLD MAN in a dressing gown wheels his drip stand out of the doors to watch the rain. He sees her. Lifts a hand.

Nora lifts hers back.

She picks up the phone. Presses the boy's photo. Holds the phone to her ear, and turns the key. The engine CATCHES.

The want is to go home without breaking. The obstacle is the envelope, and her own hand on a key she won't turn. The change is there on the page: at the start she won't answer, and at the end she calls him back and the car starts. The one sound, the engine, is the turn. Every line describes something a camera could shoot and an actor could do.

How to write action lines that carry emotion

Swap adjectives for behaviour. "She is nervous" tells us. "She re-ties a shoelace that wasn't undone" shows us. Into Film's activity sheet makes the same point: instead of a character shouting "I am so ANGRY!", "show them slamming a door, frowning and kicking a chair."

Make objects change state. A letter folded smaller and smaller, a cup of tea going cold, flowers moving from vase to bin. The USC exercises that show one space before and after an event are really exercises in objects that change.

Let the space do some of the work. Scriptshadow suggests "framing": move a break-up from the pavement into a loud nightclub, and the noise forces the characters to act instead of talk.

Write sound, not speech. The USC CTWR 505 prompt allows sound, "not voiceover, but sounds that would logically exist in the environment." Screenwriter John August suggests putting the few important sounds in capitals, and warns that "a modern screenplay isn't a list of camera angles and sound cues."

Keep paragraphs short. Raindance's guide says to keep each action to "no more than three lines" and to start a new paragraph beyond that. White space is how a silent page shows its rhythm.

Cut until it hurts, then test. Docter's lesson from Up holds on the page too. When a beat can go without the audience losing the thread, it probably should.

Common mistakes

• Directing the camera. "We see", "CLOSE ON", "PAN TO" and "SLOW MOTION" take the reader out of the story. If a detail matters, give it its own line and the reader will picture it close.
• Writing thoughts nobody can film. "She remembers", "he realises", "they both know". If the audience can't see it or hear it, it isn't in the scene.
• Sneaking dialogue back in. Voice-over, a long text message on screen, a letter we read in close-up, a character mouthing whole sentences: the page may say "no dialogue", but these still do dialogue's job. The brief in the box above rules them out, and USC's CTWR 505 prompt excludes voice-over.
• Labelling the silence. Writing "(Silence.)" or "A long pause." between every beat doesn't make the scene quiet. Short lines and specific behaviour do.
• No want, no change. A silent scene of someone doing chores is a mood, not a scene. Check the card: if the last image could swap places with the first one, nothing happened.
• Going long. One to three pages is plenty for the standard version. If yours runs five, find the single image that does the work and cut the rest.

Where to go next

Once you can make a page work without words, add them back sparingly. The subtext exercise is the natural next step: characters talk, but not about what matters. If your silent scene felt flat, run it through goal, conflict, turn. For the whole sequence of assignments courses set, see the screenwriting exercises film schools actually assign.

FAQ

How do you write a scene with no dialogue?

Start with a character who wants something they can get or lose within the scene, and put the obstacle in the room with them. Write only what a camera could record: behaviour, objects, the space and sound. End on an image that shows what changed. Keep it to one location and one to three pages the first time.

What is a film without dialogue called?

Historically, a silent film. Wikipedia defines it as a film "without synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible spoken dialogue)", and notes that the term is "something of a misnomer", because silent films were almost always accompanied by live sound, usually music. Modern films with little or no speech, such as WALL·E, are usually just described as dialogue-free or near-silent.

What does a script without dialogue look like?

It looks like any screenplay minus the character cues: scene headings and action paragraphs in present tense. John August suggests that if only some scenes are silent, you can flag them in the scene heading, for example INT. KITCHEN – NIGHT [SILENT], and put key sounds in capitals.

How do I show sound in a silent script?

Write it in the action line, usually with the sound in capitals: "The engine CATCHES." The courses that spell it out allow sound. USC's CTWR 505 prompt allows sounds "that would logically exist in the environment", and Utah's FILM 3820 asks for "action and sound (no spoken word)". USC's prompt rules out voice-over.

What is the three-line rule in screenwriting?

It's a readability habit, not a formal rule: keep each action paragraph to about three lines, then break. Raindance describes it as "current practice". It matters more in a silent script, where the action lines are the whole page.

How long should a silent scene be?

For the classic exercise, one to three pages. USC's CTWR 505 caps the no-dialogue short at three pages, and UCCS's first silent script is two pages, or about one minute. Longer silent assignments exist: the University of Guam's is 7 to 10 pages, and UCCS builds up to 10 to 15.

Is music allowed?

In the finished film, often yes. The "Married Life" montage in Up runs on Giacchino's score. On the page, keep music to the moments that matter, and remember that the exercise is about what the audience sees.