This probably isn't the right spot to recommend this book, but I'm thinking about it and, well, I think it's good for analyzing story. Geared for plays, but story is story.

Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays by David Ball. http://www.amazon.com/Backwards-Forwards-Technical-Manual-Reading/dp/0809311100

I understand the popularity of Aaron Sorkin's writing, particularly his dialogue, but I think his dialogue tends to have too many zingers, too many great lines, that it's too cute, too "precious". People don't talk that way, even brilliant, powerful ones like Presidents and their staffs. For me, it SHOUTS "written!!!" Regardless of where you come down on him, Paul Schrader once, long ago, said some interesting things about this tendency in some writers:

"I don’t think a movie should have too many good lines—at most five great lines and ten good ones—and the rest should be absolutely ordinary and banal. Too many great lines make it top-heavy and unrealistic. This doesn’t apply to comedy, of course. I think one of the problems with Terry Malick’s writing is that it has too many good lines; you begin to listen to all the good lines—Tom McGuane has the same problem—and it breaks the dramatic narrative thread of the movie. You must learn to use good lines as spice."

Love him or hate him, Schrader makes some valid points.

Some good advice here, Scott, up to the stuff about the poetry.

Modern poetry is absolutely THE WORST thing to read if you want to learn about developing a sense of rhythm in your writing!

Don't believe me? Read the example posted! Go read the review posted with excerpts of Kurt Brown's work! Who talks like that, in movies, in life?

The point of modern poetry is to obfuscate the rhythm in search of faux meaning. The rhythm is funked up and jagged and swirled, because truly rhythmic poetry is completely out of style these days.

So for godsake, seeker, take this part of Scott's advice with a grain of salt. You'll get way better results just listening to dialogue, speaking dialogue out loud, and writing a lot of dialogue.

I'm no Sorkin fan either. His work is super forgettable to me though I never could pinpoint why exactly, but maybe it's the slick dialogue.

However, I've got a copy of The Social Network script in PDF. I'll send it to Scott, in case he wants to post it on GITS. (Not sure what the policy is on scripts for movies that haven't been released yet.) If it doesn't get posted, if anyone wants it, just shoot me an email at:

thewriteidea@gmail.com

and I'll send it to you.

@nanobitches: Just to clarify, I wasn't referring to dialogue re poetry, but to scene description.

"Over time, I noticed some things that I thought had direct relevance to writing scene description."

"Minimum words, maximum impact. That has become a mantra for me in terms of scene description, and one reason why I think SD is much more like poetry than prose."

@Scott -- ah, I see that. My bad. Poetry is a good thing to study for economy in language for scene description purposes, but all readers will tell you that flowery, jagged scene description is the bane of their existence. Plain-spoken, direct & economical scene description is the way to go -- prose that elucidates, but doesn't obfuscate, the action.

I think I lost the thread of your intention re poetry because the original poster had asked about developing rhythm in dialogue. But as I said in my post, it's all good advice, and I adore this site and the work you're doing! :-)

@nanobitches: Not a problem as I did steer the discussion away from dialogue to scene description. And on that subject, you might enjoy some posts I did a few years back re the writing style in Wall-E, which Andrew stanton described as "haiku style." Go here for more.

@Scott: Heh, that's pretty cool -- fine for the boys at Pixar. But of course if any spec writer tried doing that, his script'd get trashed in 17 microseconds. :-)