How to Write Better Dialogue by Not Writing Dialogue

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. Episode 36, writing great dialogue can be one of the biggest challenges a writer faces. Today we explore a technique that most writers overlook, and it's something you've probably never thought to try. And welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast. My name is Brad Reed, and I want to thank you for choosing to spend part of your day with me today talking about writing.

I actually have very mixed emotions as I sit down at the microphone today. And before we get into today's topic, I want to kind of talk through these emotions with you just a bit. Now the show has been back on now for almost six months, and I feel like it's time to do a little bit of introspection related to how things are going so far.

Now I'll admit that I had pretty lofty expectations after the success of the show the first time around back in 2014-2015. Within a matter of just a few months back then, we had tens of thousands of people downloading the show every week. It was absolutely amazing. And I kind of kick myself for shelving it back then because we had gotten off to such a great start. Although when I look back, I didn't have a lot of choice going back to finish my graduate work and starting a new career was just too much. From what I can tell, the numbers back then would have put the show easily in the top 5 to 10% of all podcasts online back then, which is just amazing.

It was kind of a thrill ride. Well, the world is a very different place now. And as we know, the internet is flooded with outstanding podcasts on every imaginable topic, including writing, of course.

Now, when we first started out, we were one of only a tiny handful of podcasts that were exploring the craft of writing, not how to get published or build a following or get an agent, but the nuts and the bolts of putting words on the page. Well, now we're one among a myriad of great options. And it stands to reason that our listenership would be way, way down from those early days. And that's certainly been the case.

Now, don't get me wrong. I appreciate those of you who are listening to the show and sharing it with your writer friends so, so much. But at some point I have to make the decision about whether it's simply taking too much time away from my own writing time to justify the time and the resources that it takes to write it and produce it and distribute it.

Now, I haven't made a final decision on any of this yet, not by a long shot. But I feel like this decision has to be, has to come pretty soon. I mean, on one hand, I kind of feel like we just need to keep plugging away and build that listenership over time.

But I also have to think about how much slower my own writing projects and some of the other things I'm working on are coming along because of the time and the energy that I give to this podcast. So here's essentially, I guess, what I'm trying to say. There is a chance we'll be wrapping things up here in the next few weeks. And honestly, there's an equal chance that we won't. I'm just kind of in that soul-searching stage.

But even if we do, even if we do wrap it up, even if the decision is made that the writing has to take priority, I'm still a teacher at heart, right? And I'm not going to go away from that. I've tried before and there's no way I can not be teaching. It's just the way I'm wired. And that's why I'm launching a weekly newsletter featuring a lot of the same resources that you've grown to appreciate from the podcast.

So it's either going to end up being a kind of companion piece to the podcast, or I hate to say it, but it might eventually become a replacement for the podcast. So part of the reason I'm talking to you about this today is that I'd like to invite you to actually sign up for that newsletter so that I don't lose touch with you if the podcast comes to an end. We're going to be packing it full of mini writing lessons, great resources, great links for writers, motivation for those tough writing days, and even some news about my own works in progress and kind of what I'm learning from what I'm reading. You know, I might actually, I'm thinking about even doing an audio version of that newsletter and releasing it as a kind of mini podcast.

So I don't think we're going completely away from audio. We're just going to have to see. So anyway, if you're interested in checking out that newsletter, I call it the five big things newsletter. You can get some information on that by heading over to bradreedwrites. com. You'll see a link there that says newsletter and you can sign up for that and get a little more information about it.

So that's where I'm at. I just want to thank you again so much for being a listener and I hate that I kind of phrased that as, you know, there weren't enough people or there aren't enough people out there to justify it because, you know, I still have hundreds of listeners right now, which is outstanding. And I love being able to connect with you in this way.

But eventually, you know, I kind of have to look at the dollars and the cents and the time of it. And if we don't reach a certain level, then, you know, it's kind of the writing on the wall that I need to be prioritizing things a little bit differently. I truly love doing this podcast and interacting with you guys in this way. You know, at the end of the day, we all just get that 24 hours a day and sometimes something has to give.

So, all right, enough of that drama. Like I said, I have not made a decision about that yet, but I wanted to let you know as loyal listeners, that that's kind of my thought process where I'm at. So enough with all that.

Introduction to Dialogue Challenges

Let's go ahead and get into today's topic and let's get better at writing dialogue. I think the element of writing that gives me the most trouble is dialogue. And I'm actually not sure why. From the outside looking in, it feels like dialogue should be the easy part. I mean, I've been talking and listening and hearing people talk for nearly five decades now. Dialogue should be second nature to me.

But when I sit down to write it, it still often comes out clunky, unrealistic, comes out too forced. And I get what I should be doing with dialogue, right? I get subtext. I get all of that stuff. And I've learned ways to go back and revise and rewrite and rework dialogue until it's better.

The 'Dialogue Without Words' Exercise

But I never really get to the point that I feel like it's good or even great. So a recent quick write exercise I did with my creative writing class began to change my approach to writing dialogue, though. It actually came from a book called Write Now, edited by Sherry Ellis. It's the same book that I mentioned last week. And I'll go ahead and put a link to that book in the show notes if you're interested in picking up a copy. In the book, there's a bunch of different writing prompts and exercises from a bunch of different writers.

And the one that caught my attention was written by Sans Hall, author of the novel Catching Heaven and a book on writing called Tools of the Writer's Craft. And Sans introduces an exercise called Dialogue Without Words. So the challenge of the exercise is basically this. Write a scene of conflict between at least two characters with absolutely no dialogue whatsoever.

Communicating Conflict Non-Verbally

So the characters never breathe a word to each other. Instead, what you have to do is figure out ways to show the conflict through the setting, through the mise-en-scene, through the body language and actions of the characters. You know, people say that about 90% of what we communicate comes through body language, not in the words that we speak. And this exercise is your opportunity to learn to bring that other 90% into play.

So Sans recommends doing a little bit of pre-planning when you do a dialogueless scene like this or a dialogueless write. So what you want to do is figure out beforehand what the conflict is going to be. Maybe it's a marital spat over who's going to cook dinner for a night. Or maybe in the workplace, you have a trainer that's frustrated with the ineptitude of their trainee is a couple of examples. And you want to choose a setting that sets up that conflict. Choose that very intentionally.

Then simply let the characters begin to move, right? Begin to make facial expressions, to use gestures, and to interact with the things in the setting that show their emotional state, that begin to hint at their desires, what they want in the scene. Now, the goal of this is not necessarily to write so specifically that your reader could say, oh, she's upset because she thinks her husband is cheating on her with a secretary, right? Although you probably want to have that level of specificity in your mind as you're writing it. It'll help you find those details. Instead, the goal is that your reader through this scene learns and intuits something about these characters through their body language, through the setting, through their interactions, through anything other than dialogue.

So without dialogue, your readers' other ways of creating meaning, they go into overdrive. They become very, very sensitive. It's almost like when you have a blindfold on for a certain amount of time, your other senses become more sensitive. We're kind of doing the same thing here by removing the dialogue. We're causing our reader to begin to read more deeply into every nuance, every movement to discover what's going on in that scene. And I think you'll be surprised at how much you can communicate to your reader and how much your characters can communicate with each other without using any words at all.

This is How people deceive each other. So if you've created a scene where there is either no dialogue or very little dialogue, but the settings, the actions, the body language are clearly showing, you know, something like a husband who despises his wife. You could then have that husband finally walk up and whisper into her ear, I love you. And your reader will want to punch that guy right in the face, right? Because now, we know he's lying because he's been telling her in absolutely every other way that he actually despises her.

Now we see that that I love you is just a manipulation because it stands against all the rest of the evidence for the way that the man is communicating with out words. Now that we have an interesting character, right? Now we have an interesting character with ulterior motives. And your reader gets to feel like a genius because they feel like they've figured it out, right? They've read all the clues and they're the ones that figured out, oh, wait a second, this guy's lying at this point. It's a great way to get your reader involved in your story, to get them solving what we like to call those little mysteries that you've built in there for them.

Learning from Silent Films

So if you're really interested in this technique, something you might want to do is actually go back and watch some old silent films and see how they communicate emotion, how they communicate desire and intention without dialogue. I mean, sure, there's that occasional kind of dialogue card that pops up to deliver a line of dialogue. But these filmmakers were masters of accomplishing as much as possible without relying on dialogue.

So really live in the details as you watch these films. In fact, maybe even pause them every once in a while and explore everything that's going on in that scene. The way the lighting is handled, the way the camera is angled, the body positioning of the characters, the expressions on their face, the props and the tools in their hands, and the things in the background. We're noticing it all because it all plays a role in creating that wordless conflict. And all of those things are just accessible to us to use as prose writers as they are to filmmakers.

Now that I think about it, in addition to old silent films, another place that's a master of this is Pixar, especially in their little short films that they have prior to their full-on films. In fact, I was showing one of my class today. It's called Paper Man. Maybe you've seen it. Maybe you haven't.

But completely silent, right? I mean, there's music, but there's not a word spoken. And yet it is packed, packed, packed with emotion and with conflict and with story.

So take some time to study those scenes, those short films that don't use any dialogue, and learn that trick, that skill of writing what we're calling dialogueless dialogue, right? Because there's communication happening. It's just not happening in the traditional way that we do it.

Using Dialogue as a Tool

So the more I play with this technique, the more I realize how much I use dialogue as a crutch instead of a tool. So if you think about it, it's much easier to have a character just come right out and say, I'm angry with you, Bill, than it is to spend the time as a writer, the brainpower as a writer, to pause and create the perfect setting, to create the perfect background and the background elements and describe the tilt of an eyebrow or the twist of a mouth that maybe communicates that same emotion underneath the surface. But that kind of work is so worth the effort. Your readers are masters of reading these little clues because it's how we interact with the real world every single day. In fact, the only thing we've got more experience in than hearing and constructing language is probably reading into the actions and the intentions of others. I mean, if you think about it, before we ever learned the meaning of the word no, we were almost certainly able to recognize the subtle change of posture, the furrowing of a brow in a parent's face that was telling us no long before we heard the word.

So this kind of writing, this technique gets back to that basic form of reading and understanding the world. It's almost primeval, I think, and in that way, really, really powerful. So there's your tip for writing better dialogue. And the tip is write far, far less dialogue.

Now I can hear you now, right? You're saying, but I have a character who's defined by how talkative he or she is. Or, but I'm writing a phone conversation, right? Or, I'm writing a court scene where I have lawyers that are arguing.

Now, of course, there are always exceptions. And those exceptions are always opportunities to do something intentional for even more impact. So if you think about it, how much more would your Chatty Kathy character stand out if there was dramatically less dialogue from all your other characters in the story? Right? Much more powerful now. How much more would we understand the subtext of a phone conversation if we could see one party, you know, kind of twisting a phone cord nervously in their fingers as they talked?

And man, did I just date myself or what? How long has it been since anybody twisted their fingers in a phone cord? Anyway, hopefully you still get what I mean by that.

The Deeper Meaning of Dialogue

So there's an old adage that goes something like this. Watch what people do, not what they say. People could lie and deceive and embellish and withhold with their language, but what they actually do is who they really are and what they really mean. That's true in our writing just as much as it's true in the world around us. Today's wise word comes to us from writing guru and author of craft books, Story and Dialogue, Robert McKee.

Now it's tangentially related to today's topic, but we'll explore that in a second. First, here's McKee and what he has to say, among many things, on storytelling. If the story you're telling is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit, says Robert McKee. I'm going to read that once more and I apologize for the swear word. If the story you're telling is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.

Now I think this is a truism about writing that is often overlooked. We think that if we have a great premise or a great story world or an interesting, unique character, that that's enough for the story to kind of take care of itself, to work. That that'll be enough to carry it through.

But stories are always about something deeper than the plot. They're about some expression of how to live in the world or how to overcome our obstacles or how to see the world in a new way. Now we've discussed this in other episodes, but this is basically what's happening on a minuscule or microscopic level in our dialogue. Or at least it's what should be happening in our dialogue.

So we might actually modify McKee's statement here by saying, if the dialogue your character is speaking is really what they are saying, you're in deep shit. Right? So dialogue is almost always a kind of mask for what the character is really trying to say. It's a kind of weapon. You can think of it as a weapon that the character uses to try to get what they want from the person that they are talking to. Even if it's not, you know, an obviously, a situation that is full of obvious conflict.

They're still using dialogue to get what they want. So from McKee, these are wise words indeed. Right?

Now McKee is a bit of a controversial figure in the world of writing gurus. But I think there's value in every book on craft that is written. Because it's all about taking what works for you and just kind of leaving the rest behind. Maybe you're not ready for it yet. Maybe later in your life, that piece of advice will be more relevant, but for now it's not. Right?

So you set that aside and just take what is valuable to you at the time and move forward. If you haven't checked out any of McKee's work, I really, really suggest that you do. I know it's made a huge impact on my writing and it likely will on yours as well.

Weekly Writing Challenge

So this is the part of the show where I usually share a writing challenge for the week ahead. But I'm going to forego that this week since the show itself was basically a writing challenge. Right? To try to write scenes with as little dialogue as possible. And I hope you'll try that this week. Try to write an entire scene without dialogue, especially a scene of conflict.

So instead with this weekly challenge segment, I'd like to actually introduce something that I'm going to be sharing in the newsletter that I talked about at the top of the show. And I'm calling it the Big Read. And it's a chance for me to share what I'm reading now and how what I'm reading is informing my own writing.

So right now I'm reading a book called 127 Hours by Aaron Ralston. If you've read this or heard about it, you know that this is a pretty rough story, right? True story of the guy who gets trapped by the boulder and has to sever his own arm to escape and to live.

So now I know I'm a little slow getting around to actually reading this book. I mean, it was a bestseller in 2010, but honestly, I've been a little scared of this book. So I'm usually into stories of survival and things like that, but I just wasn't sure I could handle reading about somebody cutting off their own arm.

But I knew it would be a great model for what I'm writing right now for my current work in progress. So I finally bit the bullet and I dove in. I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book as of today, but I already feel like I'm getting some insights in craft from this book. And here's the insight I wanted to share with you today.

So this book seems to be a good model for how to incorporate backstory into what could be a relatively dull experience overall. Now you're thinking, wait Stuff that is the promise of the premise of the book. And as I read this, I wonder if it might have worked better if it was structured a little more like Cheryl Strayed's Wild. And what she does in that book is she is telling the story of her, you know, almost cross-country trek along the Pacific Crest Trail.

So ultimately, it's the same kind of story, right? Somebody who's primarily alone going through this struggle. But what she does is she falls in and out of backstory as the experiences that she's having naturally bring them to mind.

So it seems like a more natural way to the way that humans actually process experiences. And it's not quite as jarring to the reader, I think. So anyway, I'd love to hear your take on that, especially if you've read 127 Hours. You can write to me at bradreed at bradreedwrites. com. You can also hit me up on Twitter.

My handle there is at Brad Reed Writes. So that's going to wrap it up for us this week. I hope that I haven't turned you off with the news that we might be wrapping up the podcast in the next few weeks. Again, that decision hasn't been finalized.

But I do hope you'll subscribe to the newsletter so we don't lose touch if that is the case. Head on over to bradreedwrites. com and you'll see a link for that there.

So until next week, remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do and I hope that you're off to do the same. Let's get some words on paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.