CHAPTER 17

The Source of
Great Dialogue:
Your Own Ears

Dialogue—the words people say—is a huge component of good writing. Because fiction or nonfiction, no matter what you write, you’re going to write stuff that somebody said. The more convincingly you do it, the more you will awaken your readers’ heartbrains and bind them to yours.

More than anything, I want to help you understand dialogue so that you can begin to think about dialogue as professional writers think about it—as a component of writing that’s alive and totally your servant.

First off, let’s get in the mood.

WRITING BLAST FOR DIALOGUE

How We Talk:

The first time you found yourself in serious trouble for something you did. Lying, fighting, shoplifting, speeding, perhaps?

An argument you took part in. Siblings’ spat, lovers’ quarrel, barroom debate, for instance?

Have you ever been involved in a proposal of marriage, either the asker or the askee?

TRY THIS: Read what you just wrote aloud. If you can, read it aloud to somebody else, or better still, have somebody else read it out loud to you.

How does it make you feel? Are you engaged with what was happening, does your heart move a little bit?

I thought so.

Does any of it sound fake or weak?

I thought not.

Why is that? Because you wrote something that was totally real to you. You wrote honestly and without strain to make up something. You weren’t trying to force anything. You were in flow.

This is a key thing. You now know you can write realistic dialogue. If your book is fiction, when it comes time to make up dialogue for your characters, simply be as relaxed and energetic as you just were a moment ago, and let it come as if it’s already happened and you’re remembering it.

If you’re writing nonfiction, just be easy and natural when you’re writing what people say. Genuineness is better than precise grammar.

Great dialogue:

We’ll get at all of these aspects, but first, I’ll tell you something professional authors think about a lot.

The Great Paradox of Dialogue

Authors must write dialogue that comes across as real. Yet why does actual speech sound so dumb when transcribed onto the page?

Here’s an example.

SHE: Did you remember to pick up milk? Because Chris had his friends over and they—

HE: Yeah.

SHE: —and like I said on the phone I’m going to make pudding, and I need four cups for the recipe.

HE: Yeah.

SHE: Yeah you got it?

HE: I put it in the fridge.

SHE: What?

HE: In the fridge.

SHE: I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.

HE: It’s OK. Is anything the matter?

SHE: No. Everything’s fine.

HE: I have to get ready for bowling.

SHE: I think Chris is getting less allergic to sesame seeds. He ate a McDonald’s bun in the car with Anders and his mom, and he was fine.

HE: Still, I wouldn’t feed them to him because—

SHE: I’m not. I totally agree.

HE: I’m gonna eat, then I gotta get out of here about seven.

Fascinated yet? Me neither.

The reason real speech sounds so dumb on the page is that most of what people say is really boring!

Why? Because our lives are not like novels or movies. Most speech is self-referential, repetitive, unnecessary, and mundane.

However, there’s gold in it. Real people say unique, remarkable things, especially when they’re talking about something they feel strongly about, or when they’re talking about a memorable event, like you just did in the Writing Blast above. Those things are like gold nuggets in the fine gravel of a miner’s pan. The words and phrases that make your ears perk up, make you laugh out loud, make you cry, or make you seethe with anger are dialogue gold—keep an ear out for anything that makes you feel.

The gravel you sift out of your pan is the brainless dreck that people say and forget. It’s our job to pan for the gold.

Special Note on Dialogue in Nonfiction

It’s really OK to put lots of dialogue into your nonfiction material. In fact, passages of dialogue break the monotony of monster paragraphs of description and explanation. If you’re writing memoir, do your best to remember conversations, then write them. Be as fair and accurate as you can.

Other types of nonfiction benefit from passages of dialogue, too. If you’re writing a how-to book, it might be fun to include conversations you’ve had with mentors or competitors.

Let the people talk.

Starting to Listen

Real people don’t speak words alone. They use tone and cadence to get meaning across.

The word Oh, for instance, is endlessly flexible.

Like this:

You can see the difference on the page, and you can almost hear it. Notice that here we combined the word with punctuation and narrative to add context to the dialogue and achieve different effects. More on punctuation soon.

In plays, you’ll see dialogue that might read awkwardly but comes to magical life in the mouths of actors and actresses.

Not long ago when I read a play by the extremely talented Martin McDonagh, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, I kept noticing the word ‘so’ at the end of characters’ lines, and I was like, I guess that’s an Irish-ism. And it sort of is, but sometime later I heard myself say ‘so’ at the end of sentences sometimes, like, “I already ate, so.” Which is a trailing off with a precise meaning: “So I won’t go along to lunch with you guys.”

And I heard myself say that and a bell was ringing in my head, and I remembered those plays where sentences ended in ‘so,’ and I realized, “I do that, it’s a modernism, it isn’t totally just an Irish-ism.” And I understood another little thing about realistic dialogue there.

Tennessee Williams was a master of dialogue; I recommend reading his plays. Here’s an excerpt from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

MAGGIE: One of those no-neck monsters hit me with a hot buttered biscuit so I have t’change!

{Water turns off and Brick calls out to her, but is still unseen…}

BRICK: Wha’d you say, Maggie? Water was on s’loud I couldn’t hearya…

MAGGIE: Well, I !—just remarked that !—one of the no-neck monsters messed up m’ lovely lace dress so I got t’ —cha-a-ange…

BRICK: Why d’ya call Gooper’s kiddies no-neck monsters?

MAGGIE: Because they’ve got no necks! Isn’t that a good enough reason?

BRICK: Don’t they have any necks?

MAGGIE: None visible. Their fat little heads are set on their fat little bodies without a bit of connection.

BRICK: That’s too bad.

MAGGIE: Yes, it’s too bad because you can’t wring their necks if they’ve got no necks to wring! Isn’t that right, honey?

William Inge was also pretty good with dialogue, and while I’m on the subject of plays and great dialogue, I must tell you to read Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee. Raw, wrenching, startling—it’s just terrific.

You know that every word you write must serve a purpose, whether to move the action forward or to develop a person.

But dialogue, unlike every other aspect of our craft, is an opportunity to do both at the same time. Reading plays really helps you see that.

Reading screenplays is also a fun way to learn more about good dialogue. They’re available in libraries, in bookstores, and on line.

How to Tune In and Get Good

People talk for different reasons.

They talk in order to:

Here’s an example of a miner’s pan that has at least one gold nugget in it. This is an exact excerpt from an interview I did while putting together an oral history project for a symphony orchestra I was a member of a few years ago.

Wait, what exactly is an oral history?

Simply the spoken memories of a person or persons, recorded. The recording could stand on its own as an audio version, or it can be transcribed into written form.

This is a female musician talking. A cellist, in fact.

I remember Leo Sunny, when we were in France, on a symphony tour, and we were sitting in this restaurant, a hotel restaurant. You could always count on Leo to have his violin, and he would always serenade with his little gypsy songs, just wandering around, just this little infectious smile, who could resist that—just serenading everybody, kind of a little bit out of tune and then oh, he would serenade us when we were in the airport when we were sitting waiting, he would serenade us at the airport and also hotel lobbies while we were waiting for the luggage to be packed up. Out of sheer nothing else to do, he’d try to cheer our spirits up, keep us preoccupied. Anywhere, you could count on it.

A piece of gold from this excerpt is the phrase, “Out of sheer nothing else to do.” You know? It’s so real, so informal. I might someday have a character say, “Out of sheer nothing else to do,” or not. If that cellist had written her memories of Leo Sunny, I guarantee you she wouldn’t have written, “Out of sheer nothing else to do,” she would have written something more formal. She’d probably have left it out altogether. Which would be a loss, which is why oral histories are so rich.

Another piece of gold in here is “kind of a little bit out of tune.” Informal, kinda funky, totally real.

If you ever have the chance to do an oral history project, jump at it. If you go and ask people questions and let them talk into your microphone and you transcribe it, you will learn tons about natural speech. Unfortunately, while speech-to-text programs are freeing writers from the task of transcribing, the same programs are robbing writers of the highly educational duty of transcribing.

If you’re doing a nonfiction book, consider recording some interviews for it. You can even interview yourself! You’ll get real words you can use.

As you develop your ear and eye for natural speech, you’ll sort through the gravel and you’ll immediately pick out the gold, and you’ll use it.

Now when I say “use it,” I don’t necessarily mean insert it into your fiction or nonfiction word for word—though you could, depending on your needs. What I mean is to use it to inform yourself as to how people talk.

Read oral histories when you can. I recommend Studs Terkel’s Working, which I’m not sure is still in print, but that one is really good for developing your ear. There’s another one I have on my shelf called The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, edited by Hamilton Holt, which is filled with compelling examples.

I’d also recommend reading 9-1-1 transcripts if you can handle it emotionally. You can find these on line. Just Google 9-1-1 transcripts, or Google some famous murder case that had a 9-1-1 call, and you’ll see how people talk under life-and-death stress. In some of them, the emotion comes through, and in some it doesn’t.

As a writer, you should also develop sensitivity to ambient speech, which is the speech that goes on around you, not necessarily involving you. How exactly do you develop sensitivity to ambient speech?

Eavesdrop!

It’s simple:

First, be very aware of your environment, not merely as it relates to you. When something interesting starts to happen, don’t turn away out of politeness; get closer. Be a good witness.

Next, tune in to the speech around you and simply listen, really listen. Coffee shops are the cliché place to eavesdrop, but there’s good reason for it. Often two people who haven’t seen each other in a long time meet at a coffee shop and talk their heads off, or two people with something important to discuss will go to a coffee shop.

For about a year, I did a lot of writing at a particular Starbucks in my town. Once in a while I would see a certain type of couple: a young man sitting drinking coffee with a much older woman. Their conversations were quiet and exceptionally intense. And I saw this over and over, with a different young guy and older woman every time.

And I started to wonder about it. And I started to quietly, stealthily eavesdrop. I started to look at the bigger picture, and I realized that that coffee shop happened to be a few doors down from an armed forces recruitment center.

And I realized that these young men and … their mothers had just been to the recruitment center. And they came out and saw the Starbucks and decided to come here and talk it over.

And the faces I saw and the conversations I overheard were too intimate to recount here, but they informed me as a writer. I haven’t yet used a conversation like that in one of my books, but all of it is inside me somewhere. It adds to my experience as a person and as a writer. Being a good listener, being a sponge, will help you tremendously as a writer, too.

Practicing being sensitive to the human interactions around you is what you need to do.

Third, make notes. This is huge. How many times have you heard something imperishable, but when it came time to recount it, all you could do was weakly paraphrase? Keep paper and pen handy at all times. It’s tremendously helpful to scribble down the pieces of dialogue you hear.

Fourth, look at the bigger picture. You want to gain context. Let yourself draw commonsense inferences. Yes, that young man looks like he’s trying very hard to be confident. The mother, look at her, she’s scared, but she knows the Army might be the best place for this kid. Why? Maybe because he’s got lousy posture and a potbelly and this town has a 25 percent unemployment rate. Might be the best thing.

And that could be a story idea right there.

Reality TV is good for learning dialogue, if you can stand it. I got a good line from a reality-type program on bad drivers: “When my husband George is in the car, he becomes very argumental.” Well, can’t you just hear her talking about her kids and the new Diamonique anniversary band that she guilt-tripped George into buying her last month? Can’t you imagine her throwing together a tuna casserole while talking to her sister on the phone about the sister’s latest bout with Crohn’s disease?

Documentaries are good, too, the ones where ordinary people are allowed to talk at length. I’m a fan of Michael Apted’s social documentary series (“7 Up,” “14 Up,” etc.).

As you listen to conversations, you’ll realize that dialogue consists of two things:

Here is a key point for authors: One is as important as the other.

As you listen, focus on how they’re saying it.

Developing your ear for actual speech will let you use the vernacular for your own purposes.

What does vernacular mean?

Simply the everyday speech of a region or group.

My neighbor told me the other day that he had once again, with the greatest determination, picked up The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and he was going to read it if it killed him.

Why was he having such a hard time with it? You know: the dialect, of course. Twain was totally faithful to the regional vernacular and dialects, both white and black, of the old South, and it requires a bit of work to make your way through it. Once you get it, though, you get it and you enjoy it.

“Huck, does you reck’n we’s gwyne to run acrost any mo’ kings on dis trip?”

“No,” I says, “I reckon not.”

Today readers don’t have much patience for dialect, so my baseline advice is minimize it if you need to use it at all. Furthermore, readers are extremely sensitive to stereotyping. So this is a tricky area for authors.

If you do decide to use dialect, sprinkle little bits of it here and there to suggest it and let the reader use her imagination to fill in the picture.

Ah! Here’s our Cockney friend to illustrate:

“Glad to ’elp, gov’ner, it’s the first house on the right.”

versus

“Glad to ’elp, gov’n’r, it’s the first ’aouse on the royt.”

Cockney is a variation of British English. The second example is actually more accurate than the first, but it gets to be a li’tle much after a woyle.

Here’s an example of a common American accent:

“Elizabeth, your cah has to be moved. You can’t pahk on the street overnight.”

That example has two words that were changed, to indicate, oh, a Brooklyn or a Boston accent, I guess. You could probably get away with just one and still be successful.

Use your best judgment, and remember, less is better when it comes to accents and dialect.

Your chief goal as a writer of dialogue is to absorb the way people talk and make it your servant. In the next chapter, you’ll learn much more about creating dialogue.

ACTIONS