Everybody’s Talking at Me, The Art of Dialogue, by Josh Stallings

Q:  Share your tips for writing believable dialogue. What separates good dialogue from poor, and how do you strike a balance between too much and too little in a scene/book?

A: David Mamet said he always carries a pad and pen with him so when he overheard good dialogue he wrote it down. When I steal words from a chainsaw sculptor, it isn’t theft, it’s an homage. I try and always have a Moleskine notebook and a Fisher Bullet Space Pen with me to capture story ideas and snippets of dialogue that I either hear in my head or in the world around me.

In the early stages of writing a new character they tend to sound wooden. It takes me getting to know them well enough to dial in how they think and feel. Cisco in TRICKY was easy to start with because he was based on my son Dylan. I’ve listened to Dylan his whole life, his rhythm, word choice, and humor all came through. As I got deeper into the writing, Cisco’s life growing up in East LA added its own flavor to the dialogue.

Grandpa Hem in the same novel grew up in Deaf Smith Texas. My friend Amy loves a good turn of phrase. She was raised in Texas and she had a relative who used to say, “It’s hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock.” That became a touchstone to Hem’s dialogue. I made the mistake of googling Texas Slang. Every phrase I found came out corny. I’ve spent time in Texas so it is best to draw on what I’ve heard than to trust Google. A little regionalism goes a long way. Planting a line like rats fucking early on tunes the reader’s ear so that they will hear all that character's dialogue with the tone or accent. Little things help remind them. “Git.” instead of “Time for you to leave.” Lets you know it’s Hem talking.

I write until I know a character and then go back and revise early dialogue. I also have a file about every character and as I discover more about them I add to their bio description. I note if they are frivolous with their words or miserly. Do they want to sound better educated than they are because they feel insecure? Do they front with street slang to sound tough and cover fear? By building this file I can refer to it a hundred pages later when they reappear and I’ve forgotten what color their eyes were or that they spoke in broken Spanglish in chapter two.

I have been told by enough women to believe them that I write wonderful female characters. I’ve been asked how I do it. Simple. I have never written a woman character. I have written many characters that are women. Gender identity, affectional orientation, cultural, or racial backgrounds are not characters. They are monolithic generalizations and of very little value when writing a character’s dialogue. 

A good place to study dialogue is by reading plays. David Mamet’s American Buffalo is a master class in rhythm. Sam Shepard’s True West delivers complete fully rounded flawed characters using only dialogue. I love films, but a screenplay relies on knowing it is a visual medium. So much can be said with a close up on an actor, that the dialogue doesn’t need to carry the work. When reading a play I was taught to only read the dialogue. Stage directions of any kind are almost always written by the stage manager after the play has been mounted and might not reflect what the writer was thinking at all.

Find writers whose dialogue speaks to you. Reread their books and ask yourself “Why do I like this? How does it work?” Take it apart and look at the lines. Steal freely.     

 Here are a couple of books with dialogue I dig… 

Set in LA 1963 Gary Phillips’ One-Shot Harry subtly uses dialogue to remind the reader of the era and place without ever clubbing you over the head with it. He writes about Black characters that come from every educational level and social strata.

Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows covers characters from multiple levels of LA’s social classes. Actors, film makers, petty thieves, executives, cops, each with their own coded language. He captures but never mocks his characters. 

In Lou Berney’s Dark Ride he writes with love and respect about a stoner slacker thrown into a situation that calls forth his need to be a hero or as close to an approximation of a hero as he can pull off. It vibes a Hitchcockian everyman for our times. Written in first person even the descriptions read like dialogue. 

“I’m the kid in the back row, moving his lips and just pretending to sing. I’m the dude with a fake badge and a toy gun. The dumbest thing you can do, if you’re someone like me, is believe you can be more than you are.” — Dark Ride: A Thriller by Lou Berney  

I haven’t answered the last two parts of this question. How do I know good dialogue? It’s like the court’s take on pornography vs art, I know good dialogue when I read it. It’s one of those intuitive things that ultimately inform what becomes our individual voices. 

How much is too much or too little dialogue? Same answer as above. Tana French’s Murder Squad books all come down to these incredibly long dialogue driven interrogations. They read almost like transcriptions of an interview. It gives a level of authenticity that’s hard to achieve. I haven’t ever used that much dialogue, but I’m damn glad she does. Her books sing a brutal tune that I love to read. As a writer or a reader there are NO RULES… Okay, there is one rule, everything is possible if you can pull it off. I’m not Tana French, I love what she does but I’ll leave real time interrogations to her.

Last thought - I have been lucky enough to work with editors I trust to guide me when I stray too far off the map. And editors who push me when I stay too safely inside the known lines.