How Aaron Sorkin creates musical dialogue in 'The Social Network'

• Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin layers his dialogue with rhythmic patterns, such as repetition and iambic meter.
• One advantage of Sorkin's fast-paced dialogue is that it's more jarring when there is a sudden pause in his characters' conversation.
• Sorkin says that when writing his dialogue, "What the words sound like is as important to me as what the words mean."

Following is a transcript of the video.

Mark: I wasn't making a comment on your parents. I was just saying that you go to BU. I was stating a fact, that's all.

Narrator: This is the opening scene of "The Social Network." And this is what that dialogue looks like in a graph.

Mark: You don't have to study.

Erica: Why do you keep saying I don't have to study?!

Mark: Because you go to BU!

Narrator: "The Social Network" was written by Aaron Sorkin, a writer whose scripts are often described as "rhythmic" or "musical." But those descriptors are vague, and I wanted to find out exactly why Sorkin's writing sounds so distinctive.

Administrator: I don't understand.

Mark: Which part?

Narrator: So I counted every syllable in each line of dialogue and put it in a chart. I did my best to pick several other two-person scenes with similar attributes and compared the graphs of these scenes to the one from "The Social Network." And what you end up with is pretty amazing. You can actually see the rhythm of how Sorkin writes compared to other writers. I also compared this particular "Social Network" scene to other pieces that Sorkin had written and found similar patterns across his writing. So, what exactly are these rhythmic elements? And why does Sorkin incorporate them in his writing?

Well, the first thing that stands out when comparing this scene to others is that Sorkin uses longer lines of dialogue. In the opening scene for "The Social Network," Sorkin has nine lines of dialogue that are over 45 syllables long, more than twice as many as are in the opening of "When Harry Met Sally," one of the film scenes most similar to "The Social Network." The upside of sprinkling these mini-speeches throughout this scene is that it creates more variations in the rhythms of the dialogue. By pairing these longer lines with the quick and witty banter that Sorkin is known for...

Erica: I'm sorry you're not sufficiently impressed with my education.

Mark: And I'm sorry I don't have a rowboat, so we're even.

Narrator: He prevents the exchanges from getting too repetitive. If every line in the scene was roughly the same length, the exchanges would get dull. You can also see just the sheer amount of dialogue in this one scene. Sorkin fits considerably more lines of dialogue into this five-minute scene than other writers' scenes of the same length. While part of this is due to the fact that Sorkin likes to write characters who naturally speak fast, he tailors his scripts to ensure faster dialogue in several ways. First, he writes very few action lines compared to other writers. And Sorkin also controls the speed of the dialogue by frequently having characters interrupt and speak over each other.

Mark: I'm sorry, I mean it.

Erica: I appreciate that, but I have to go—

Mark: Come on. You don't have to study. You don't have to study. Let's just talk.

Erica: I can't.

Narrator: So, why increase the speed of dialogue? Obviously, it's entertaining to listen to, but there's more to it than that. Having faster dialogue allows for more variation in the tempo of the scene. For a good example, take a look at this clip:

Mark: You don't have to study.

Erica: Why do you keep saying I don't have to study?!

Mark: Because you go to BU!

Narrator: The blurring exchange of dialogue between the characters increases the impact of the subsequent pause, making the moment much more jarring. The syllable chart is great for looking at the broad patterns of rhythm in Sorkin's writing, but to understand how he composes his words to give his dialogue a musical quality, I took a closer look at his writing. While it is natural for words to repeat themselves in dialogue, Sorkin has an extreme amount of repetition in his scripts.

Take a look at the opening of "The Social Network." Everything that's highlighted is a word or phrase that's repeated. In fact, out of the 141 sentences in the scene, 22 of them are repeated essentially verbatim. That's 15% of the sentences in the scene. When looking at the scenes from other films, they have nowhere near as much repetition. By listening to these lines of dialogue, you can tell that Sorkin is intentionally repeating these specific words and phrases to create a rhythm that simply sounds good.

Erica: I think we should just be friends.

Mark: I don't want friends.

Erica: I was just being polite. I have no intention of being friends with you.

Mark: I'm under some pressure...

Narrator: This repetition is fun to listen to, regardless of if you pick up on it or not. As Sorkin aptly puts it, "What the words sound like is as important to me as what the words mean." If you can believe it, there's actually one more literary trick that Sorkin embeds in his dialogue: writing in meter. Meter is a poetic structure that was famously used by Shakespeare in many of his plays and sonnets. There are several types of meter - I won't get into the details here - but one of the most famous versions is iambic meter, which is the repetition of one unstressed and one stressed syllable.

Romeo: But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

Narrator: Because iambic meter naturally sounds so appealing, some say it sounds like a heartbeat. A number of famous lines from film history are written in it.

Gertie: E.T. phone home.

Elliott: E.T. phone home.

Dorothy: You had me at hello.

Maverick: I feel the need...

Both: The need for speed.

Narrator: And some of Sorkin's own characters in "The West Wing" discuss the merits of writing in meter.

Toby: He wrote a dissenting opinion in what I'm almost certain is trochaic tetrameter.

Narrator: So it should come to no surprise that Sorkin incorporates meter into his own writing, especially for some of his most memorable lines, to give his writing a little more rhythm in important moments.

Sean: A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool?

Narrator: Using meter is a small way to make a sentence naturally sound more pleasing. As Sorkin describes it: And that's the whole point. The key to why Sorkin's writing is so exciting to listen to is that it literally sounds like music.

Almost any song will do, but one song that is a particularly good comparison to Sorkin's writing is "Anything You Can Do " from the musical "Annie Get Your Gun." The parallels are pretty obvious.

♪ No, you can't ♪ ♪ Yes, I can ♪ ♪ No, you can't ♪ ♪ Yes, I can ♪ ♪ No, you can't ♪ ♪ Yes, I can ♪

Erica: There are really more people in China with genius IQs than the entire population—

Mark: The Phoenix is the most diverse. The Fly Club—

♪ No, you can't ♪ ♪ Yes, I can ♪ ♪ No, you can't ♪ ♪ Yes, I can ♪ ♪ No, you can't ♪ ♪ Yes, I can ♪ ♪ No, you can't ♪

Erica: I have to go study.

Mark: You don't have to study.

Erica: Why do you keep saying I don't have to study?!

Mark: Because you go to BU!

♪ Anything you can do, I can do better ♪

Sean: A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool?

Eduardo: You?

Narrator: Sorkin's melodic dialogue is just plain fun to listen to. The rhythm and the pulse are engrossing. At times I don't understand the technical jargon that he uses in his scripts...

Mark: They have 10 minutes to get root access to a Python web server, expose its SSL encryption, and then intercept all traffic over its secure port.

Narrator: But it's still completely entrancing. And this is what I think makes Sorkin's writing so special. By putting in the extra effort to layer his dialogue with rhythms and melodies, he ensures that his scenes are incredibly entertaining to listen to. And I would have to agree with Sorkin when he says: "It's not just that dialogue sounds like music to me. It actually is music."