In real life, spoken language together with body language carries mountains of information and, like many if not most writers, you may find it difficult to convey the richness of this in prose. But you have already started writing dialog by doing writers Adrienne Harun and Midge Raymond’s exercises on character development in last week’s article. In Harun’s exercise, a secondary character tells an anecdote from her own life of which her current situation vis-à-vis the main characters reminds her. In doing Midge Raymond’s exercise, you have two characters speaking behind the back of a third character.

Now that you’ve written some dialog, it’s time to consider what makes dialog really good.

Writing good dialog means remembering that in real life, people don’t always say what they mean, don’t always give the information they are asked for, or answer questions and/or react in a direct manner. (“I’m pregnant,” the teen said to her grandmother. “Oh, my dear, I’ve just made you some snicker doodles.”) Writing good dialog means understanding that dialog is not for telling things to the reader that the author is afraid readers will miss or that the author just wants to get in there out of sense of her own mission.

 In the Art and Craft of Storytelling, Nancy Lamb uses this example to show what happens when a writer puts a lesson in a character’s mouth: two people are discussing a third who smokes a lot of dope. One says she doesn’t know why he does and the other answers: “I just read a study that says smoking dope changes your chromosomes — not to mention the fact that heavy use impairs your memory.” The purpose of dialog is to reveal character, not the author’s message: “I’m really worried about him, too.” Dialog creates mood and it has to be right for the story and the people in it. Characters must sound like themselves, not like the book’s narrator or the author or like one another. A believable character is not going to say, “I am asking for this reservation because I want to impress my girlfriend.” Depending on his nature, he might say, “Do you have a table for two at 7? How about a table for one knock out beauty queen and the guy who gets to take her to your restaurant?” Or, “Come on; you’ve gotta have one table free.”

When you start listening to people as a writer, you’ll find many bright sparks of dialog among the mundane and repetitive words we utter all day long. Listen to how people hide behind their words, knowingly and unknowingly reveal themselves, and say many things without thinking. But moving, clever, and entertaining dialog is usually crowded out by things we say and hear people say each day. When you do hear interesting phrasing, make note of it. Some writers keep notebooks of overheard or imagined dialog that strikes them, thinking they might use it in a story. As writers, we usually take out “umms” and “ers,” “likes” and “you knows.” We don’t have characters talk unless they need to — which means only the significant passages of what they say are included. And we are careful that the dialog we write doesn’t simplify people and make them sound dull by spelling everything out. “Oh, yes, we will be there by seven on the dot because I am always punctual,” is dry and expository, showing the hand of the writer announcing, “I want to be sure my character is noted for such and such.” It is our job as writer to make our characters sound like people anyone might have heard, though some of their language is more entertaining or gripping than the words heard around us everyday.

In Creating Unforgettable Characters, Linda Seger reminds us that good dialog has a subtext, which indirectly shows what is at stake emotionally for a speaker. When people are together they say a lot of things that reveal the level of their self-esteem and perceived rank vis-a-vis others. They say things they think will be perceived as cool when they feel awkward and anything but cool. They keep secrets. They may try to be polite when hostility is threatening to leak through at any moment or calm when they are worried. The grandmother doesn’t say, “Oh, my, I need time to process this” or “Oh, I must stay calm,” or “Oh, this is too surprising for me,” but offers snicker doodles, an action that may allow her time to get her thoughts and reactions together.

When you write dialog, think about who is talking and how what they say reveals their occupation, rank, region of origin, ethnicity, educational level, attitudes, thinking style (logical, impulsive), desires, obsessions, and concerns. Also remember, that in addition to using external dialog — words a character says to others — we can do some of our job using internal dialog — words the character thinks.

James Baldwin’s use of dialog, both outer and inner, and commentary in the short story “Sonny’s Blues” portray the main character’s sadness, anxiety and distance from his own background:

“Look. I haven’t seen Sonny for over a year, I’m not sure I’m going to do anything. Anyway, what the hell can I do?”

“That’s right,” he said quickly, “ain’t nothing you can do. Can’t much help old Sonny no more, I guess.”

It was what I was thinking and so it seemed to me he had no right to say it.

“I’m surprised at Sonny, though,” he went on — he had a funny way of talking, he looked straight ahead as though he were talking to himself — “I thought Sonny was a smart boy, I thought he was too smart to get hung.”

“I guess he thought so too,” I said sharply, “and that’s how he got hung. And how about you? You’re pretty goddamn smart, I bet.”

Then he looked directly at me, just for a minute. “I ain’t smart,” he said. “If I was smart, I’d have reached for a pistol a long time ago.”

“Look. Don’t tell me your sad story, if it was up to me, I’d give you one.” Then I felt guilty — guilty, probably, for never having supposed that the poor bastard had a story of his own, much less a sad one, and I asked, quickly, “What’s going to happen to him now?”

He didn’t answer this. He was off by himself some place.

“Funny thing,” he said, and from his tone we might have been discussing the quickest way to get to Brooklyn, “when I saw the papers this morning, the first thing I asked myself was if I had anything to do with it. I felt sort of responsible.”

I began to listen more carefully.

Finally, body language and gestures are part of dialog. As readers we assume the speakers look and move certain ways as they speak. But if the writer points out what they are doing with their bodies, it may contradict what we think and help us understand subtext. A man nervous about meeting a blind date might ring her bell and awkwardly hold flowers obscuring his face while he says, “You look just like Sally said you would.” This could indicate his fear about how she’ll like his looks.

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Your Turn:

Using your story characters, try this exercise Lisa Owens, author Frenemies: Dealing with Friend Drama, uses to focus her students on getting comfortable using dialogue that they can build into a story:

Spend five minutes writing a scene or complete short-short story using nothing but dialogue. No narrative or description allowed. Start your dialogue with the statement below and see where it takes you. Imagine that the first speaker is a 12-year-old boy.

“I don’t want to.”

Decide who he is talking to and what that person has to say about what he doesn’t want to do. Write without stopping. Have fun and try not to over think the process — just see what comes out. At the end of five minutes, put down your pen/take your hands off the keyboard.

Take a quick moment to think about how different your dialogue might be if you kept the same basic situation but made the first speaker a 12-year-old girl. Who is she talking to and what is that person’s response to what she doesn’t what to do? Now try that. Write for another five minutes. And remember, no stopping, no editing.

Now using the same characters, try this exercise inspired by Janice Eidus, author of The War of the Rosens:

Write a story with two characters, in which much of what they say to one another is a lie. What is the characters’ motivation for lying? Do they believe one another’s lies? If so, why? If not, why not? Using italics, write the internal thoughts of the characters as a kind of dialog to let the reader know the answers to these questions. Inner dialog is most interesting when it contradicts the outer dialog.

Now try one or more prompts from this list I’ve created to get your characters speaking:

It’s like this whenever I…

Come on. Let’s…

What about (those Mariners or the time you…)

Aren’t you going to tell her/him we’re going to be ….

I told you I was voted best…

If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times…

Where did you think I was going to get something like that?

If I had a pink suitcase [tickets to Hawaii, a cigar to smoke], I’d …

One of these days, I’m going to (or not going to)….

Hardly anyone knows this about me. Well, I can’t say it out loud really, so let me tell you how it happened….

It isn’t really as horrible as it sounds [looks]. I can explain….

Look, I love you, but….

I’m tired of you telling me that….

Finally, try your hand at alternating between inner and outer dialog. Put your character in a position of having to convince others in your story to do or buy something. What does he or she say to the others? What does he or she think as she is talking and hearing and seeing the others’ responses and expressions?

Don’t forget to also give the character something to do. Sip or gulp coffee? Stack and restack papers on a desk? Pace? Count the leaves on the wallpaper?

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The more practice you give yourself writing dialog the more natural it will seem to use it in your storytelling. And the more direct speech you have in your fiction, the more immediate the story. If you start writing stilted dialog, finish a scene and then go back and fix the dialog. Finding the places where the character doesn’t sound like him or herself and the places where you the author or your narrator have decided to put message words in the characters’ mouths instead of using other story elements will help you write more fully and engagingly.

As Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall write in Finding Your Writer’s Voice:

Surrendering to your characters takes a leap of faith: You must believe that their thoughts, words and actions will convey the story adequately, so the reader “gets it.” But it’s precisely this surrender that gives them a chance to become themselves. At the same time that you find your voice, you relinquish voice to your characters.

If you have questions about when to use dialog, how much dialog to put in a story, and what the general purpose of conversation is in your story, go with what happens naturally as you write. Then show early drafts to trusted readers and ask them where they missed hearing what the characters have to say and learning what they are thinking. Ask where they felt the story slowed down because of too much dialog and inner thinking. Ask them where the dialog kept them reading and where they skipped over the characters’ words. Ask them if there are places a character seems out of character and if that was entertaining, added important information or was distracting. Others’ responses tell you a lot about what keeps readers in your story and jars them out of it.

Next week, we’ll talk about building scenes.