Not literally. Just fictionally.

This week, we had yet another writing exercise which was linked to the screenplay analysis we did. Our task was to write a scene – with no dialogue – where Character A learns that (offscreen) Character B has been killed in an accident.

Here is what I came up with:

INT. KITCHEN - NIGHT 

RYLIE hums to the melody of the music as she begins dicing the carrots. 
The broth simmers behind her. She glances at her children, DAWN (5) and 
DARIA (3). 

INT. LIVING ROOM - CONTINUOUS

Dawn sits on the carpet, bouncing in her place while singing along to the 
movie. Daria sits beside her, oblivious to her sister and the movie, and 
continues playing with her large lego blocks. 

INT. KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS 

Rylie smiles to herself and returns her attention to the food she is 
preparing. She slides the diced carrots from the chopping board and into 
the broth. Her phone vibrates. 

She takes her phone from her back pocket and reads the text message. She 
drops the chopping board. 

From what I’ve written above, we learn that Character A (Rylie) receives bad news through a text, although the fault here is that we don’t know what that bad news actually is. If I were to continue this, I would write in a part where we see what the text message says and there we would learn that Character B had been killed.

I thought that this was a really good exercise considering that this is something I would like to explore in my own writing; a scene/s without dialogue. At this point, I’d really like to look into how I could paint the characters without vocally expressing themselves. Writing scenes without dialogue really makes you think about how you could show a character’s personality and really makes you consider your choice of words in order to achieve this.