What We're Talking About When We Talk About Dialogue

 

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?

I am struggling with this topic. I’ve been told that to write dialogue well, you need skills in observation and good ears. My eyes are fine, but my hearing is terrible. Seriously. I’m considered profoundly hard of hearing, with 70% damage in one ear and 50% in the good ear. I can’t hear anything behind me, and if I did I couldn’t locate the noise. I read lips, so if I can’t see it, I can’t hear it most of the time. I’ve made serious gaffes in social interactions, enough so that I avoided people for years. I’ve come to laugh at what I’ve gotten horribly wrong. If you meet me, ask me about the “Cat and Calf in a Bar” story. Something most people don’t want to hear (pun intended) is that people are not neither patient nor pleasant with those of us who are hard of hearing, or with disabilities, in general.

 

That I’m told that I write crisp dialogue well perplexes me because I sincerely don’t know how to describe how I do what I do. I simply do it. I’ve known intelligent people who can’t write worth a lick, and polyglots who would write dialogue so wooden that it should’ve sank with the deck chairs on the Titanic. I know this isn’t helpful to readers, but I write dialogue leaning forward, into the story. I dislike dead air because life is movement, even when it doesn’t look that way. Think of the ocean. It’s both beautiful but there’s menace beneath the surface. Dialogue appears to be all surface, but what is beneath is character, psychology, and subtext. We can discern a lot about a person by the words they use.

 

I’ll write two or three paragraphs of description or action before I have someone talk. I do this, because I know attention spans are short. Writing good speech requires a good ear, and both of mine are faulty, so I guess what “works” in my dialogue is humor and that I fit speech patterns to the personality of the speaker. I think I do some form of The Method from acting to sync speech to character. I become that character. Then there’s cadence, the way one of my characters talks, the use of contractions and fragments. In real life, talk is not grammatically correct nor does it require an extensive vocabulary. 

Speech is meant to communicate ideas and information. Dialogue is transactional. Two people want something from each other. Sometimes I’ll have characters answer a question with a question, either for clarification, or because they have something to hide. This is called mirroring. To see how effective this strategy is for tension or creating a comedic effect, watch the movie Midnight Run. The logic behind the interrogative is that a Yes or No ends the conversation, but questions or a paraphrase of what the other person said will keep the ball in the air.

Subtext in dialogue is difficult. It’s talking about Lord Voldemort, without saying his name. It’s hard to execute well, but think of it as every conversation must have have consequences. Permit me a stark but real example. The rules to a sit-down meeting in the world of organized crime provides an example of subtext, and it’s no different than a confrontation in the corporate boardroom. You’ve been invited into a room. A peer has accused you of something, be it something financial or a personal slight. The grievance is aired and you sit there like a samurai. You don’t say a word until you’re told you could speak. The catch? You know the person is lying through their teeth. The stakes? Lose your temper and you die. Call them a liar, you die. When you respond, you do it in a way so those around the table know that without you saying the word LIAR you’ve proven your innocence and demonstrated your integrity. Subtext.

There are thorns in the rose garden of dialogue, and the recent movie American Fiction illustrates some of them. I won’t delve into the intersection of Art and Commerce here, but writers have to make ethical decisions around dialogue. A writer has to choose between the Ideal and the Real, to wear rose-tinted glasses or not. There is the Ideal or Utopia, where people do and say the right things, and then there is real life, where what people say and do contradict each other.

My Shane mysteries have ethnic groups opposed to each other, class distinction, gay and straight characters. Nobody in Shane’s world is a complete innocent. I wrote dialogue in the Shane novels that was somewhat accurate to the 1970s, the era in the Shane Cleary mysteries are set. I say ‘somewhat’ because I downplay the racism and sexism in dialogue. I don’t use much of the profanity or epithets people used casually then. I’m aware that some of my readers were not alive during Shane’s decade, but I will tell you that language in the 70s was raw and it had energy, for better or worse. Language that would be considered ‘offensive’ today was used on both sides of the table, across gender, race, and social class. Neither sensitivity nor politeness were issues because “Feelings” was a song on the radio, and it was a one-hit wonder for a reason.

You didn’t need to hear well to experience the way people talked then, but you could feel the pulse with your fingertips.

I try to put that across from the keyboard to the screen, to the page.

THE BIG LIE, the fifth Shane Cleary mystery is out today, March 12, 2024.