What Madison Avenue Can Teach You About Writing Better Dialogue

CHRIS KNOPF writes two Hamptons mystery series starring Sam Acquillo and Jackie Swaitkowski. He also wrote Elysiana, about which Publishers Weekly said, “Smart dialogue and sharp social observations distinguish this stand-alone thriller from Knopf.”

I ’d already spent about thirty years in ad agencies writing copy before my first novel was published. I’m often asked if copywrit-ing benefited my fiction, and I always say, “Yes, in every way possible.” This is particularly true as it relates to dialogue. And this is even truer for writing mysteries and thrillers, inhabited as they usually are by tough guys, crackpots, and regular Joes. It’s hard to convince your reader of gritty realism when your characters talk like nineteenth-century elocutionists.

Writing to a fixed increment of time is another important discipline copywriters have to master. A TV commercial (we call them spots) is usually thirty seconds. Radio usually sixty. Of the two forms, I think radio is the best exercise for fiction writers. TV spots are little movies, fictions for sure, but as in the big-movie business, the visual elements often dominate. In radio, words matter, and, as with a book, there’re usually no visual aids. Radio, like fiction, relies on manipulating the theater of the mind, using language to engage and seduce the audience into buying an artificial reality. Unlike fiction, however, you need to tell your whole message in sixty seconds, or less. This teaches you how to prune, condense, and telegraph your story, which almost always makes for a more energetic mystery or thriller.

We’re taught in advertising to keep our copy conversational, to write the way people speak. Which is usually in sentence fragments. Sometimes only one word. Honestly.

Grammatically iffy. But highly readable.

Speech is far more economical than written exposition. Even the most voluble blowhard will tend to drop unnecessary verbiage, frequently skipping things like pronouns to get right to the action verbs.

“Watcha’ doing there, Joe?”

“Catchin’ fish. You?”

This example also points to another reality of spoken English. We often drop the g’s off gerunds and other “ing” words. Even the well educated and erudite will do this, only more sparingly (e.g., Barack Obama). Also, we nearly always use contractions whenever available. Few things will mess up conversational speech more than using “do not” or “cannot” when “don’t” or “can’t” will do. Just don’t overdo it. Informality can’t sound ignorant.

There’s a place for monologue in advertising and fiction, but when two or more people are speaking, there’s little in the way of long dissertation. Rather, they tend to pass phrases back and forth like a pair of tennis players. Especially in great crime fiction (e.g., Elmore Leonard).

When writing radio and TV commercials, not only are you drafting copy, you’re casting potential talent, framing out the type of people you’ll need to fulfill the spot’s objectives. So you need to hear your characters’ voices in your head.

EXERCISE

Write a sixty-second radio commercial using only dialogue to sell a product that probably doesn’t exist. Like woven nose-hair ribbons or an ion-powered composter. Make it a conversation between two people of distinctly different characters. Concoct a story line wherein these two people could be realistically discussing your new product. Before writing your commercial, describe the characters and the story line (the creative concept). What screenwriters call a treatment.

For general guidance and inspiration, you can hear lots of great spots on YouTube, or go to the Radio Mercury Awards website.

Keep in mind the conventions of normal conversation described above, but go one better. Knowing that you have to tell a story, define one or more characters, and convincingly sell a strange new product in sixty seconds, apply the rules of haiku to your copy: no extra words, every word must add meaning.

This lies at the heart of great dialogue, especially the hard-boiled variety. If you can say it in three words instead of five, it’s almost always more powerful. And it’s really not that hard to do if you’re willing to cut until the life goes out, and then carefully add back.

Then, write another spot that is strictly monologue. As before, write your treatment and describe your character.

Then let somebody who doesn’t care about your feelings read the spot and give you feedback about what you were trying to achieve. See if you made a convincing argument, not just a well-wrought conversation. Compare their comments with your treatment, and either glory in your success, or go back and try it again.