Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible.
—P. G. Wodehouse
Good dialogue isn't just conversation recorded. It's a distillation of the spoken word that cuts to the quick, leaving out the fillers that punctuate everyday speech, such as the "urn's" and "like's" and "you know's" and the mundane phrases and social niceties that are necessary in life but a bore in fiction.
Instead of "She picked up the phone and said, 'How are you?'" what about "She picked up the phone and heard her mother's voice before she even said hello: 'Honey, your brother's missing."' Good dialogue starts at an active, involved place and makes you want to read on to know more.
There's nothing better than good dialogue to show us who characters are by revealing their quirks and traits and motivations. Good dialogue can kick a story into high gear, helping a scene progress and teaching us something we didn't know about the characters or the plot.
Although dialogue is more—and less—than a transcription of conversation, make an effort to listen to people's conversations, noting the way things are said as well as what is said. Every writer should spend some time as an eavesdropper. It's a guilty pleasure and an invaluable source of material.
You'll know good dialogue when you hear it. When you're out on a walk, at a restaurant, or at the market, and you find yourself leaning in to hear more, you know it's because the dialogue you're hearing is smokin'! I was at the Long Beach flea market, walking down an aisle between tables of carnival glass, old windows, and vintage fabrics when I overheard a woman say: "How about this for the name of an insect: queenie white thighs?" Later someone else said, "Didn't we buy an iguana here?" I got out my notebook and jotted these lines down.
There is so much to say about writing dialogue and whole books have been written on the topic. What you'll find here are a few salient points.
When you write fiction, one of your most important decisions is whether dialogue or narration works best for a particular scene. Too often dialogue is used to provide information that could better be given indirectly. Think about pacing. Narration speeds things along by condensing speech or slows it down by offering long descriptive passages. It tends to tell the reader what is happening; dialogue dramatizes that action, showing not telling. Dialogue also breaks up the rhythm of long narrative stretches, livening the writing by letting the characters speak for themselves.
Paradoxically, dialogue, coupled with gestures, is often useful in getting across what isn't said in talking around something. It draws the reader in, forcing her to pay close attention and interpret or anticipate the course of the narrative. For instance, a couple sits at the breakfast table. "You've seemed distant lately," one partner says to the other, who is engrossed in the newspaper. She doesn't look up, but says, "I've just been busy. Everything's fine." But is everything fine? The only way to find out is to read on.
I asked my student Phil Doran, once a TV sitcom writer (for The Wonder Years, among other shows) and now an author, for his suggestions on writing dialogue.
"I try to 'hear' my characters speak because dialogue is about the spoken word," he says, "and that's why reading dialogue aloud is a handy thing to do. Like real dialogue, it is unstructured and free-flowing. People speak in sentence fragments and cut each other off. And if I'm not going for what you'd consider a joke, which is mostly what I am going for, I at least try to find a spike somewhere in the run that contains something shocking, or revealing. In other words, what is there in this run of dialogue that makes it worth doing, as opposed to giving the same information in a paragraph?"
Short story master Ron Carlson elaborates further. "The bad dialogue you see isn't the old clunky dialogue we used to see a long time ago, real wooden and kind of telling. The bad dialogue you see now is a little blasé and a little television. I was watching television last week and within thirty-five minutes I heard the line, 'I can't believe you...' whatever it was. TV writers should post a rule that anyone who says that will be fined.
"They say dialogue is meant to advance a story. Well, it is if the story is The Da Vinci Code, but it isn't if it's one of my stories. The dialogue may advance the story, but it's going to have trouble since the characters don't know the story yet and they've got to sit there and find it out. I listen as hard as I can to them and I try to let them speak to their ability. Not everybody knows or is able to articulate their current state. Dialogue is not meant to be on topic; it's meant to be dramatic, personal. It comes from the source, the heart. So many times when you're writing dialogue, you're really writing the way people don't talk to each other, the way we can't listen to each other, or the way we use words to obtrude, to obscure and hide.
"What we [readers] are looking for is somebody that so obviously has thought about every word, the way Annie Proulx does or Annie Dillard, two writers who are real fresh. I think Robert Stone does. [In their work] you never see these big clunky blocks of prose that the people use when they start to get painted in the corner."
Good dialogue tends to be streamlined, minimal. To the point, but rarely right on the nose. Good dialogue runs along parallel lines, intersecting now and then.
Just a few more details:
In most types of writing—except for romance novels—use said (if you're in past tense) and says (if you're in present) as attributions. Occasionally, use asked, recalled, or similar under-the-top verbs. This is one area where active, descriptive verbs should be avoided. Never use attributions like carped, retorted, whined, exclaimed, chortled, or vomited (unless you're going for humor or writing a children's book). These tags draw attention to themselves and not to the words being spoken. Forms of said are as invisible in a line of dialogue as the wind.
Consider using action to show who's talking: "'There's nothing sexier than a man who cooks.' Liz ran her fingers down Chris's back as he stirred the applesauce."
A dim-witted character's dialogue is unbearable. So is most dialogue written phonetically.
Let your characters interrupt one another.
Get caught up in the rhythm of speech. "Remember that [dialogue's] a stylization, not a literal version of the way people actually talk," says crime writer T. Jefferson Parker.
And read your work aloud. Reading aloud allows you to hear the glitches and smooth them out.
Here's a writing assignment: Go to a café or restaurant, one with the tables situated close to one another so you can hear conversations around you, or go to a restaurant by the off-ramp of a freeway where travelers from all over stop to eat and rest and gab. Find a spot and just listen and take notes.
Pay attention to what you hear. Listen to the cadences of conversation as well as what is said. Speed, interruptions, phrases such as "I think" or "It's just my opinion, but..." reveal a lot. Who interrupts who? Does one person pause before speaking? Fail to reply? How do men speak differently than women? Author and instructor Tony Eprile says he often recommends Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand, which is about power relationships in dialogue and how men and women use dialogue differently.
Pay attention to what the people don't say, and be aware of what you don't write down. Pay attention to when you lean in, when you shush whoever is with you or curse the background music—when that happens, you know you're hearing good dialogue.
Likewise, pay attention to what doesn't interest you, the filler language that makes you start looking at the menu again or considering a piece of apple pie á la mode. Good dialogue makes you want to find out what happens next.
Now, for fifteen minutes, write your own conversation between a man and a woman. In gripping dialogue, there is often conflict, however subtle. One is saying yes while the other is saying no. What does the woman need? What does the man need?
Write it down, then revise. Embellish, delete, strengthen.