Tips for Writing Dialogue

Years ago, I realized that there are a few simple tricks for writing lively dialogue.

The most important thing I learned to do at that time was to take my dialogue and essentially to cross out every other sentence. In particular, almost any sentence that begins with "Yes" or "No" can be crossed out.

In the several writers workshops I have participated in since then, I have noticed that almost all beginning writers do the same thing I used to do: they say everything twice. For instance, one gets dialogue like the following:

"What do you think of George?"
"I hate him. I can't stand the guy. I think he's arrogant and self-centered."

This is an extreme example, since it says the same thing three times. The last sentence says it all.

"What do you think of George?"
"He's arrogant and self-centered."

Another trick is to avoid the predictable response. If a one can read a line of dialogue while covering up the line that follows it and predict the response, then the dialogue is boring.

The dialogue I see most often from fellow students in beginning workshops is like a tennis game between two very slow players. Each player hits the ball directly back to his opponent, perhaps trying to hit it a little harder and with a slightly different spin.

But good dialogue is more like a game of tennis between two good players: a player sends the ball off in a different direction than it came in, making his opponent chase it.

In good dialogue, as in real conversation, people don't respond directly to what has been said to them. Their response often goes off in a completely different direction.

I took this trick to an extreme in my story, "Armistice Talks." That story is a conversation between two very self-centered people. Each person is caught up in a need to say certain things, and for much of the conversation they don't seem to listen to each other at all, and they constantly interrupt each other. And yet there are occasional moments which make it clear that each one does hear what the other says.

Here's an example of an extremely fast tennis game, as it were, expanded from something given in a book on linguistics. A group is discussing an upcoming Christmas party.

"Whose car should we take?
"Suzi's on antibiotics."
"Okay. Is that all right with you, Suzi?"
"I don't mind."

Although this is realistic, it is probably faster than many readers can follow. One can clarify it by adding two more lines.

Rita gave Helen a puzzled look.
"I can't drink," Suzi explained.

And if one is willing to be just a bit heavy handed, one can have have Suzi add another sentence at the end: "Because of the antibiotics."

Some readers will be annoyed by the lack of attributions here, although it doesn't really matter who says what. Another interesting point is how we know that the people in this conversation are all women. This has to do with the difference in style between women's speech and men's, at least in casual conversation. Men's conversations tend to be more disciplined, with each person waiting their turn, whereas women's conversation is often much more pell mell, with lots of interrupting. Furthermore, women are often much faster on the uptake and don't need everything spelled out.

Another trick is actually a trick for writing in general: namely, to avoid the obvious word. When I read over my rough drafts, I find moments where I think, "Well, this is pretty boring." And then I try to think whether there are more lively words I could be using. The trick is to use a different word than the reader would have predicted, but at the same time to avoid going for the exotic ten-dollar words that one needs a thesaurus for.

I succeed in doing this because I am constantly listening to the way people talk to each other and fascinated by it. If a writer doesn't have this interest, then I don't suppose he will ever learn to write good dialogue.

The way to come up with an interesting way of saying something instead of the obvious is not to wrack one's brain. If you sit at the computer making an intense effort to come up with something, the result will probably sound like an author trying to be clever instead of a character speaking naturally. Instead, the way to find words that are interesting and natural to a character is to simply relax and wait for the words to come. One gives the character a chance to speak rather than putting words into his mouth.

The words I need may not come while I'm sitting at the computer. The words are likely to come to me later, while I'm at the grocery story or riding the bus or at my corner bar, engaged in a conversation with someone about some completely different topic. But this will happen only after I've put in quite a bit of time at the computer first to get my mind going.

Of course the vocabulary and the whole manner of speaking of a line of dialogue needs to reflect the personality of the speaker. Conversation is not just an exchange of information; it's an exchange of energies. In fact, often the information exchange is not really important at all.

If I am having a conversation with a pretty women I hardly know at a bar, then it's likely that my primary purpose will be to convince her that I am an interesting person worth getting to know further. And her purpose will be somewhat similar, all probably not quite the same.

Here's something that actually happened once at Specs. A fairly pretty woman was sitting near me and complaining that the bartender was taking a long time to serve her. "I'm starting to think that it might be personal," she said.

I could see that the bartender was very busy with other customers, but I said, "Aw, you're probably just not cute enough." This made the woman friend she was with laugh, because it was so completely outrageous.

It's hard to do this sort of thing in fiction, because there are so many factors other than the words spoken that make it clear that I was teasing the woman, flirting with her. In particular, it's very important that she was actually quite pretty, otherwise she might have taken my words seriously. Making her laugh was my primary intention, giving her a little distraction from the boredom of waiting for her drink to be served.

When the bartender, who I knew well, finally came down to where we were sitting, I said to him something even more outrageous. "This young woman was just asking me who you have to fuck to get a drink in this place." She smiled and didn't deny saying what I'd claimed she had, because it was so obvious I was joking. And I'd saved her from needing to complain.

"That would be me," the bartender said, and asked her what she was drinking.

I had accomplished my purpose, which was to make her think that I was an entertaining guy. Unfortunately, it turned out that she had other interests to pursue that evening, and I never saw her again. She would never have had more than a momentary interest in a guy my age in any case.

It seems to me that Elmore Leonard is an author who is good at presenting this sort of flirtation, which can easily come off as obnoxious if not done well.

In something I wrote recently, set in the early Sixties, a young student has arrived at the house of a professor. The professor says to his wife: "He came looking for a party. Unfortunately, we are obliged to disappoint him."  The phrasing here, especially the word "obliged," is a bit unusual, and aside from being interesting for the reader, it shows right away what a pretentious person this professor is. He's the sort of person that tries to never say anything ordinary.

The professor's wife has a very different sort of energy.

"In the universe," she said, "there are no mistakes. Although sometimes," she added, with a glance at her husband, "there are things that make you wonder."

In my first draft, I had written with a meaningful look at her husband. But this was a bit too heavy-handed. It's like a nudge-nudge wink-wink to the reader. By changing the meaningful look to a mere glance, I actually made it more interesting. (Or at least that was my hope.) The reader now wonders whether the wife is hinting at something or not and wants to continue reading, in the same way that one wants to continue listening when one overhears a conversation and is not quite sure what is going on.

The energy of the third person in this conversation, the young student, is very different than either of the other two. He is very straightforward in saying exactly what he means with no attempt to be clever.

"My name is Ryder. A friend of mine who is a folksinger told me there was a party here. But probably she wrote down the address wrong. Or maybe it was a practical joke. She might do something like that."

Here is a longer extract from this piece (which still needs a bit more work):

"Ah, well, yes, Kafka, of course," Martin [the professor] said. "I think that everyone has to go through a stage where they are passionately in love with Kafka. And Dostoievski. Good for those long winter nights when you really want to feel totally depressed. All those incredibly long sentences, and even longer paragraphs. Wonderful, of course, but a bit of a chore, wouldn't you admit?"

"The paragraphs would have to be longer than the sentences, in any case," Ryder pointed out, in an attempt to be witty.

"Aha! So very astute of you to have caught me out on that one. Even in Hemingway, the paragraphs would be longer than the sentences, wouldn't they?"

Realizing that he was being humiliated, Ryder wanted to just keep his mouth shut now. But Martin stared at him expectantly until he was forced to answer, "Yes, because the sentences are inside the paragraphs." For an instant he had the impulse to add that he wasn't a big Hemingway fan in any case, but then had the sense to realize that this would only compound the impression of stupidity he was creating.

"Exactly," Martin crowed. "The sentences are inside the paragraphs! Mark one up for the chemistry brigade," he said with a gesture of triumph toward Greta. "Our young friend does indeed understand a thing or two about literature."

And then he gave an enormous wink to Ryder.

This piece (which unfortunately will probably eventually be thrown away since it's probably not useful in the novel it's supposed to be a part of) is my first encounter with the professor and his ditzy wife. The professor is even more condescending and sarcastic than I had first intended simply because I was having so much fun thinking of pretentious things for him to say. And he seems to be developing a bit of a British accent. I had originally written "Score one for the chemistry team" (the young student Ryder is a chemistry major), but this sounded too banal, so I changed it to "Mark one up for the chemistry brigade," which of course is not idiomatic American English at all. (Notice also the Britishism "You caught me out.") I had no particular interest in having this professor be British, but the British phrases make his dialogue more interesting, at least to an American reader.

The professor patronizes Ryder by referring to him several times as "our young friend," when in fact they have just met and it is clear that they will never be friends. I was especially pleased with his statement that Ryder knows a thing or two about literature. This is a typical upper-class British understatement. Normally it would mean that the person in fact knows quite a bit about literature. But since Ryder's statement has been in fact so trivial, the professor's statement qualifies as sarcasm.

But when I reached this point, it occurred to me that the whole situation, with a professor humiliating a young student, was a bit trite. So I decided to reverse the direction of the whole interaction by having the professor then give Ryder an enormous wink.

Certainly no reader can stop reading at this point without want to discover the significance of the wink!

And here is an extract showing the very different energy of the wife, who has just said that she needs to roll herself a cigarette.

"I have cigarettes," her husband said.

"Yes, but you know how I feel about machine-made ones. You see," Greta said, "I believe that if you make something lovingly with your own hands and then put it into your body, it will not harm you. But machines are not friendly to us. So if something is made by a machine, then of course it will do its best to kill us. Do you agree?" she asked Ryder.

"It's all tobacco," Ryder said.

"Ah, you see Martin? This young man is a chemist, so he knows. Even when you roll your own, it's still tobacco. So you still get the same good from it. But you don't give the machines the opportunity to attack your body. Isn't that right?"

Not wanting to disagree with this, Ryder said simply, "I don't smoke."

"Oh. Well, that is certainly commendable. You must have some other interesting vice then."

There's no way that any of the wife's dialogue could have been said by either the professor or the student. Of course the biggest difference between the wife's lines and those of the other two is not the vocabulary and phrasing, but the ideas and attitudes.

If a writer listens with fascination to the way people talk, then inevitably a certain part of the dialogue he writes will be plagiarism from real life. The opinion that Greta expresses above about the health advantages of rolling one's own cigarettes is not something I ever heard anyone actually say, but the general tone of it is typical of a number of hippie/new age women I have known. Furthermore, the attitude is typical of the rationalizations for smoking one frequently heard in the Fifties and early Sixties, before the famous Surgeon General's report on tobacco came out.

On the other hand, the comment, "You must have some other vice, then" is one I frequently got as a student in my twenties, almost always from older women, when I said that I didn't smoke.

Here is a longish extract from the a story I wrote twenty years ago called The Chekhovian Smile. The speaker, Dmitri, is described in the story as an "aging hippie," but it would be more accurate to call him an aging beatnik. I have known many of these aging hipsters in my life. (One can look at one of the video interviews with Lou Reed, for instance.) I like to think that I did a pretty good job of capturing their way of talking. Dmitri is like the professor Martin in the previous dialogue in that he tries to never say anything ordinary. But Dmitri and Martin have completely different energies. Although Dmitri likes to project a façade of being tough and cynical, he has a big heart, whereas Martin has a big ego.

I devoted quite a bit of time to finding unusual and hip ways for Dmitri to say things. A picky critic might object that "Did a Jack Kerouac" is not very accurate as a phrase meaning to run away from home, but I think that it's one that would have seemed natural to Dmitri. I have never heard anyone use the word "chicklet" to describe a teenage girl before, but I think it is in character for Dmitri to say it. The more usual word "teenybopper" seemed too trite.

"She was one of these little chicklets that blow into the city every summer," Dmitri says of that girl from the past while you half-listen politely, "from places called Ferndale and Hicksdale and Junction City or Lost Horizons. Their fathers work in new car showrooms or sell real estate or are vice-presidents in the local bank. Hers was a minister---sometimes they're the worst. She'd stolen some money and he gave her a lesson in Christian charity by beating her up. The usual crappy melodrama. So she jammed her treasures into a duffel bag and did a Jack Kerouac. When she got to St. Theresa she was picked up by a bunch of hoods who beat her up all over again and raped her just as an afterthought.

"She was afraid to go bawling to the police--- not that it would have done her any good. A couple of the guys found her over on Coleridge Lane in the wee hours, semi-hysterical. Since nobody else wanted her, they brought her to me." Dmitri rolls his eyes and twists his mouth.

"I let her crash on the couch. I mean I could hardly have made her share the bed, considering, even if she'd been better looking, which she wasn't. But I damn well wasn't about to take the couch myself. It's damned uncomfortable. Fact of it is, I wasn't feeling very generous about things. I'm approaching an age where I'm supposed to be an object of charity, not handing it out."

In The Chekhovian Smile, I did something which I think is almost always a bad idea: I had one character recount a story to another inside the main story. The problem with this is that the reader gets the interior story at second hand, as it were, and while the story is being told, the main story is pretty much reduced to two talking heads. Furthermore the writer is unable to use all his usual fictional artistry to make the interior story interesting, since he is restricted to telling it in the voice of his character.

At the time, I didn't understand that this is a problem, and furthermore the structure of the overall story pretty much made it a necessity. And in this case, it seems to have worked. I think the reason why it works is the amount of emotion involved. The narrator (as it were) has just had a very disturbing encounter with a teenage girl named Stephanie the previous night. And Dmitri is recounting the story of a girl named Stephanie he knew years before. For Dmitri, the memory of Stephanie is intensely emotional. And gradually the reader and Dmitri and the narrator all realize that the girl the narrator met the night before was actually the ghost of the girl Stephanie that Dmitri once knew.

The fact that the narrator has such a strong emotional response to Dmitri's story makes his role in the dialogue more than merely saying, "Gee whiz! And what happened next?"

And the fact that Dmitri has such a colorful way of speaking partly makes up for the fact that the interior story is not told with the usual artistry with which an author creates immediacy in fiction.

Lively dialogue is characteristic of movies (except for serious French movies) and television, especially sitcoms, where the goal is to get a laugh every minute. I sometimes think that some of the dialogue I write is too cinematic for written fiction. If carried too far, one falls into what I think of as the Oscar Wilde syndrome. One example of this is the movie Stainless Steel Magnolias (based on the Broadway play of the same title), which is nothing but a collection of one-liners. But it's worth remembering that this movie, despite the lack of any real substance, attracted a large very enthusiastic audience.

"Lively" doesn't necessarily mean witty. Lively, as I'm using the word anyway, simply means the opposite of predictable. The various Startreck series seem to maintain a medium level of liveliness in their dialogue, as do television series such as L.A. Law and Law and Order.

Non-lively dialogue functions well in some types of stories. In this respect, soap operas seem to be at the opposite extreme from sitcoms, and soap operas have many dedicated fans. The Jean-Luc Goddard film Breathless became a cult classic despite the fact that all the dialogue in it is banal and clichéd. In fact, I think that the banality of the dialogue in Breathless is one of the essential elements of the film and is part of what gives it its very French and "existential" flavor. (And what do we mean by this word "existential," so easy to use in a facile and almost meaningless way? In my opinion, in this sort of context it has nothing to do with what I learned in the course on Existentialism I took in college. It simply relates to the attitude that life is essentially meaningless. People talk to each other, but they don't really communicate; they are just animals making noises.)

Gestures.

I believe that providing characters with gestures is enormously important, for three reasons. First, for me anyway, it contributes a great deal toward making a scene seem real. Reading a piece of fiction where the gestures are non-obvious and used very convincingly, I think, "Surely this must be a transcript of a conversation that really happened. I don't see how anyone could have made all this up." There have been books I have gone through and underlined or circled many of the gestures, in an attempt to learn how to do this sort of thing better myself.

Secondly, gestures can provide a means of pacing the dialogue, of giving one's work rhythm on a higher level than the rhythm of words in sentences. In my young days as a writer, I often used to write things like, "He paused for a moment." Eventually I realized that a gesture can accomplish this in a more interesting way.

In my first draft for a story, I sometimes simply write "[GESTURE]" at points where my sense of the rhythm of the narrative indicates that a gesture will be needed. Later on, I can go back and figure out what gesture will work. I don't claim that this is a particularly good strategy, but it is one I need because finding gestures is so agonizingly difficult for me and it's important to me not to let it interrupt the flow of the writing.

And finally, the use of gestures can enable one to eliminate the perpetual "he said,"  "she said" of written dialogue.

Harry carefully poured an inch of whiskey into his glass. "Do you have any idea how much trouble all this may be for us?"

Sally took her glasses off and set them on the table. "It's not something we can go on ignoring."

Harry looked at her quizzically. "What do you think the possibilities are?"

She pushed the hair up off her forehead. "Surely you don't need me to explain."

He scratched his nose. "I don't believe in crossing bridges before we get to the river."

She gave him a wry smile. "I think I hear the sound of rushing water already."

Blah blah blah....

One of the things this very bad example shows, though, it how easy it is for this trick to become an annoying mannerism. Furthermore, the constant insertion of mere random gestures will not enhance a scene. A gesture should contribute something important to making the character alive. The wry smile and maybe even the quizzical look are things I might want to keep, but I don't think the reader is really very interested in reading about the nose scratching.