How to Write Dialogue That Sounds Real

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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 12. On today's show, we're talking about dialogue, why it's much more than just people talking to each other, or at least it should be. And we are back. Welcome back to the show here at the show's website.

My name is Brad Reed. And I want to just offer a quick apology for not having an episode up last week. You know, two weeks before that, I prepared you a little bit saying that I may not have time to get the show produced that week. Funny enough, it turned out it wasn't an issue of time, it was an issue of technology. I sat down for a great interview with author J. E.

Fishman and just had a great time talking to him about all sorts of aspects of the writing craft. And unfortunately had a technology issue where the interview didn't record like it like it should have and I couldn't get it produced. So my sincerest apologies to Mr. Fishman and to you, my listeners as well. I hope to have him back on the show very soon, as soon as I can figure out a backup system for recording so we don't run into that issue again.

But I hope you go check out J. E. Fishman's website. Get to know him a little bit, get to know his writing a little bit so that when he's on the show soon, you'll have a little better frame of reference for our conversation. You can find him at www. jefishman.

com. So I hope you'll check that out. There is a slight chance that I won't have a show again next week. I've got to go in for a little bit of a surgery at the end of this week. Nothing major, fortunately, but it may preclude me from getting a show recorded. I hope not.

I think I'm still going to be able to get it on. But just in case I don't, that's where I'm at. And I'll be back the week after that.

Introduction to Dialogue Challenges

So today's show, I want to talk about dialogue. And to be real honest, dialogue is one of the areas that I am the weakest. It's one of the areas that intimidates me, honestly, when I'm sitting down to write. And I think it's because it is such an abstract thing for us to get a handle on. I mean, we hear things like, you've got to make your dialogue sound natural, but at the same time, natural dialogue doesn't make great fictional dialogue.

So it's got to be natural and yet written in an unnatural way. It's got to move the plot forward, but it can't be contrived. You know, it's a dialogue is one of those things, one of what I think is the most difficult aspects of creative writing. And I've really had my eyes opened to it over this last couple of months in a way that that has really proved beneficial to me.

And so I wanted to share some of those insights that I've gained here lately on the art and technique of writing dialogue. And a lot of this came from an experience that I just finished, which was a really intense screenwriting class. Now, even though I've read literally shelf fulls of books on screenwriting and I've toyed around with writing my own screenplays, this class was an experience I I really wasn't expecting. I wasn't expecting the challenge of it. I wasn't expecting the emotional connection that I had to the to the work that I was doing in it. And I really wasn't expecting the lessons that I learned from that screenwriting process that translate to my fiction writing, especially when it comes to dialogue.

So that's what we're going to talk about today is how how this fiction writing class has really or this screenwriting class has really caused me to look at the way I write dialogue differently and really help me and hopefully it'll help you. So that's the plan for today. It really started for me with the realization that I had fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of dialogue. I mean, as I was outlining my scenes and yes, I'm very much an outliner, just so you know where I'm coming from there.

But as I outlined my scenes for a project, I'd often outline a scene where I'd have two or more people that need to discuss something. You know, that was kind of the point of the scene is that I need these characters to get together and I need them to talk about this thing. And I think that's something we all do. I mean, dialogue is just part of the world of fiction writing.

So I think we all end up with these scenes where it's important that we get these characters to discuss something, maybe come to a decision about something or share information with each other. I mean, our stories are as much about relationships as they are about action. I think even if you're writing action, there's still those dynamics of relationships that that come about through the action that make us care about the action.

Understanding Dialogue as Action

But this is exactly where my misunderstanding came in. I didn't see dialogue. I didn't see conversations as action. And they really are. Dialogue really is action. If you're writing dialogue, you're actually writing an action scene.

So let's explore a little bit what I mean by that. It basically all comes down to who is in charge of the dialogue, at least for me. You see, as the writer, I was always I always felt like I was the one in charge of the dialogue that's going down on the page. I mean, I knew what my characters needed to talk about. I knew what had to happen in the scene and I knew what the outcome of that conversation would be.

Now, when you pair that sense of control with with my belief that brevity is the key to good writing, especially in dialogue. I mean, there's nothing worse than a conversation going on and on and on and never quite getting where it's going. So when you pair that that feeling of control with that belief in brevity, then then that shows the way I was approaching dialogue. I mean, it was something I was in control of, something that shouldn't last very long and that really only existed to move the story ahead in a very specific way.

So here's the revelation I gained from studying a what felt like a mountain of screenplays and the way they approached dialogue. When we look at good dialogue, it becomes clear that the writer isn't necessarily the one in control. Now, I know that's a little abstract, but but follow me here. If the writer is not in control, then who is? Well, it's the characters. We have to understand that the characters enter into a scene with their own agendas.

And it's those agendas, never my agenda, that's important in that scene. In other words, characters enter into a conversation wanting to accomplish something that isn't necessarily what I, as the writer, want the scene to accomplish. Let me share an example. Maybe that'll help illustrate it a little better. In the novel I'm working on right now, I've got a scene where my main character is trying to explain some of the basics of bike racing, like cycle racing, to a character who is eventually going to be his love interest in the story.

So what I wanted that dialogue scene to accomplish was really two things. First of all, we had to define some of the racing terms that my readers would need to be familiar with. And I also needed to set up this love interest as somebody who would be desirable. You know, I needed the reader to begin to want these two to get together.

So those were my desires of this scene. Those were my goals. Well, do you see why that approach was wrong? Both of my goals were focused on the potential reader.

In other words, my characters weren't real people with real agendas. They were simply placeholders that simply mouthed the words that I needed them to say to get across what I was trying to do with that scene, what I was trying to communicate to the readers. They weren't real people in that scene. And the scene felt that way. It ended up feeling very pat, predictable, lifeless.

Character Agendas in Dialogue

So that really is the first key that I want to talk about here. The first thing is that the characters' agendas come before my own. That's the only way that I've found for the characters to feel real, for the scenes to feel real, for the dialogue to feel real, if it's about the characters' agendas, not my own.

So here's what I do to counter this problem in my writing. Before I write a scene of dialogue, or any scene for that matter, but especially dialogue, I spend some time identifying what the characters' agendas are in that scene. What is each character trying to accomplish? And it can't be the same thing that the other person is trying to accomplish. If you've got a dialogue scene and they're both exactly on the same page and they're trying to communicate the same information and they've got the same goal, you don't have any tension in that scene. And without any kind of tension, you really don't have a scene, especially not one that is interesting.

So let's use the example that I just mentioned above and kind of walk through this. In that example, I realized that my scene only existed to tell my readers information. And while that seems like the highest purpose of a scene, it is actually a death sentence for the scene. The scene has got to be doing more than just feeding your audience information.

So after spending some time thinking about character motivations, I realized that Carter, that's my main character, was trying to impress this girl with his knowledge of racing, the fact that he used to be a racer, and that he is probably going to purposefully talk over her head a bit, kind of showing off for her. So that's his motivation in the scene. And I also realized that Sarah, that's the soon-to-be love interest, is really trying to feel this guy out. I mean, she's interested in him, but she wants to get a sense of who he is, what his background is. She doesn't actually care is enough to work in this scene. I mean Carter is wanting to show off while Sarah's just trying to get to know him.

The scene works a lot better. And as the writer, I still get my way. I still get a way to communicate some of the things I need the reader to know, but I do it from an authentic character with an authentic motivation. We learn a little bit about bike racing and we start to see the possibility of a relationship between these two.

So that's kind of the first insight that I gained on examining dialogue. And I don't know why it took reading a screenplay or a mountain of screenplays for me to kind of get this, but for some reason it did. There's something different about the way a screenplay is written that just makes us look at writing a little bit differently. It really has to do with de-familiarization that we talked about a few weeks ago.

So it's really an interesting thing to do as a writer is to look at different forms of writing and screenplays are just quite dramatically different from regular creative fiction writing. So it was interesting. The second thing, we'll go ahead and move on to the second thing that this process helped me learn to do. And this is still a new technique for me, but I'm having really exciting results from it.

Reverse Engineering Dialogue

So it might be something you want to try. And the technique is this. I write the scene backwards from the way I used to write it. I think of it as kind of a reverse engineering. And what I don't mean here is literally write, you know, from the end of the conversation to the beginning. That's not what I'm talking about.

It's really based on the concept that good, vibrant dialogue is helped by people who don't respond directly to what the other person has said, almost like there are two different conversations going on. And I used to try to put that element into my dialogue after I had initially written it. In other words, I'd write the dialogue dead on, each character responding directly to what the other character just said until I had the scene down. That's kind of how I rough drafted it. Then I'd go back and I'd try to put some gaps in the conversation, you know, places where the response of one character is disconnected from the other's comment. And while this worked okay, I felt like I was always trying to break the conversation open to make it work better somehow.

So what I mean by reverse engineering the conversation is that I first identify what each person wants to accomplish. Now that's what we were just talking about in step one there. But I first identify what each person wants to accomplish and then I write the dialogue completely disconnected, or at least as disconnected as I possibly can.

In other words, my goal is to write the conversation as if the two people aren't talking to each other at all, aren't even hearing what the other person is saying because they're so preoccupied with what they're trying to say. Then when I've got this completely disjointed conversation down on paper, then I go back and I look for ways to connect it a little bit, ways that maybe one can twist the words of what the other one said in some little nuanced way, or maybe ways that a response can apply to both of their agendas. I know this is a little abstract.

Analyzing Hemingway's Dialogue

So I want to look at an example of somebody who I think really does this quite well. So what I want to do is look at Ernest Hemingway's short story, Hills Like White Elephants. I hope it's something you've read. It's a short read. If you haven't read it, or even if you have and would like a refresher on it, head on over to the website at the show's website. And you'll find a link there for a PDF for Hills Like White Elephants.

You can pull that up. And read it, you know, really read it two or three times and pay attention to the nuanced dialogue. Pay attention to the way the back and forth is disconnected from each other. It's really interesting. We're just gonna have time to look at a few examples of it here.

So Hills Like White Elephants is a short story about a man and a woman who are discussing whether or not the woman is going to have an abortion. If you've read the story before, you know that the topic of conversation is buried underneath their actual conversation. So what I want to do is look at some of the dialogue, paying attention to the two things we've just talked about today.

The first that each character comes in with their own agendas. And second, that the dialogue and responses are in large part disconnected from one another. So the man's agenda in this conversation, which happens as they're drinking beers while waiting for a train, is that he wants the woman to have the abortion, but he wants her to be okay with it. Almost like he really wants it to be her decision so he won't come right out and tell her to do it in the conversation. The woman's agenda is a little more mysterious, but I think it's that she's basically tired of talking about it. She's getting sick of his kind of passive aggressive way that this man is trying to coerce her to do it and just doesn't want to deal with it.

I mean, especially not at this specific moment waiting for the train. So with those competing agendas in mind, let's take a look at just some of Hemingway's dialogue from Hills Like White Elephants. And I'm going to jump in kind of to the middle of the story here. And it starts with just one quick line of narration. The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table. The beer's nice and cool, the man said.

It's lovely, the girl said. Now, even in that first little exchange, the beer's nice and cool and her response, it's lovely. Is she talking about the beer is lovely or is she talking about the warm wind that blew in against the bead curtain against the table? We don't know. There's a disconnection there, right? We're not sure how connected she is to this conversation at all.

And it's lovely isn't really the right response to this beer is nice and cool. It's disconnected just enough that it makes it interesting and feel real. It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig, the man said. It's not really an operation at all. The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

So here we have conversation where, you know, her response is no response. It's a body language response. Again, certainly not just, you know, directly answering what he said.

So the man continues. I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in. The girl did not say anything again. No response.

She's kind of in denial that she's even hearing this. And then the man continues. I'll go with you. And I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in. And then it's all perfectly natural.

And she responds. Then what will we do afterwards? You notice how disconnected that is? I mean, here he is really, you know, just hitting on this and hitting on this. It's not a big deal. It's not a big deal.

You should do it. It's not a big deal. And her response isn't to argue that point or to ask questions about it or to state her opinion. Her response is, then what will we do afterwards? It shows where her mind is. We get to know a lot more about her as a character, about him as a character, just in the way this dialogue is disconnected and the way that it shows both of their what they're trying to accomplish in the scene.

I'm gonna go ahead and skip down to just a couple more lines here and then we'll leave it at that. Well, the man said, if you don't want to do it, you don't have to. I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to.

But I know it's perfectly simple. So, I mean, this guy just won't lay off, right? His motivations are very clear. And the girl, and you really want to? Again, she's not, you know, he's trying to get her to say she wants to. And she's not ready to go there.

She keeps turning it back on him. It's disconnected. Then he says, I think it's the best thing to do, but I don't want you to do it if you really don't want to. I mean, this is not dialogue in brief. You know, this is not brevity. In a way, this is repetition.

How many times can this guy say, you know, I don't want to do it if you don't want to do it, but you really should want to do it, right? But it tells so much about his character, so much about his motivation. And then the girl responds. And if I do it, you'll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me? Right? She's not talking about the abortion.

She doesn't want to direct it. Now she's worried about the relationship. She's worried about the fallout of this decision. And then he responds. I love you now. You know I love you.

Again, he's almost addressing what she's saying, but he's not. She's asking if he'll love her then afterwards. And he answers with, I love you now. You know I love you. Doesn't answer a question.

So we're going to leave Hemingway there. I really do hope you'll go check out Hills Like White Elephants again at the show's website. It's only, I mean, it's literally on my printout of it about two and a half pages.

So it's a very quick read once. And I hope you read it over two or three or four times and really pay attention to what the dialogue is doing. I want to hit on really quick a third technique. And this is one that I'm just starting to experiment with.

Motivations and Misunderstandings

But what I've really found a lot of fun actually and really quite effective. And this is that as you're writing your dialogue in between the lines of dialogue, stop and to react to that? Are they going to misread what was said? Are they going to find a few words in there that they can stop and twist around? Are they going to misunderstand what that person said by those words? Are they, because of their motivation, going to even hear it or hear it in a wrong way?

It really provides that break for us to stop and consider how we can disconnect that dialogue in a really effective way. You know, this reminds me of a section of a book. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It's a book called Story by Robert McKee, and it actually is purportedly, I'm not sure I'm using that word right. It's supposed to be written for screenwriters, but he certainly mentions in there that it applies to novel writing and other forms of writing, and I couldn't agree more with that. It is, I think it has been the best book on writing that I've ever read, whether you're writing screenplay, novel, whatever, because the advice is so practical.

If you're a fan of structure or feel like you need more structure, it does an amazing job at that, but it also touches on all these other elements of writing, including dialogue, and it really hints at this third technique that I was just talking about. It talks about stopping to examine the motivations, the reasons that our characters are saying these things, not just because we need to accomplish something in the scene, but because this is the way the characters are wired. And interestingly, how often those motivations change during a conversation, during dialogue, where it's almost like a boxing match, where if the left jab isn't working, maybe you've got to try an uppercut, or, you know, I'm not a boxing guy, so I don't even know if that analogy makes sense, but I hope you understand what I mean by it.

Anyway, you know what, I'm going to finish with that plug, because, you know, I hope you're getting something from this show, from what I'm bringing you, but if you want really great, really solid, really interesting advice on writing that you can put to work right now today, pick up a copy of Robert McKee's Story. In fact, I'll feature that over on the page at the show's website. If you're going to pick up a copy, please do pick it up through the website. We get a little bit of money every time something sells through the site there, which helps us keep the doors open here at the show.

So I'd appreciate that. But anyway, even if we weren't making a dime on it, and that's about all we make, I would still highly recommend Story by Robert McKee. If you've read it, or if you pick up a copy and read it, I'd love to hear your feedback on that as well.

Weekly Writing Challenge

Okay, so our weekly challenge this week, I thought about having you do one of these dialogue exercises. But rather than that, I mean, I hope you'll do those anyway. But rather than that, I'd encourage you to read a screenplay. Have you ever read one? If you have, maybe go back and read it afresh, taking a look at the way they do dialogue.

But if you've never read a screenplay, I really recommend that you do. It's a great way to defamiliarize yourself with writing in general and see your own writing in a new way. I recommend a series called the Shooting Script series. In fact, I'll throw links up there to some of those as well on the website the show's website. And you can check out some of those Shooting Script series screenplays. You can find a lot of screenplays online.

A lot of them tend to be written after the fact. You know, it's a fan of the show that's literally just kind of typed out a transcript and thrown in a few action lines. And they're just not very good and not very reliable.

So I do recommend that you find an actual published copy of a screenplay. So that's a great way to do it. Our wise word this week. It seems fitting to get our wise word from a screenwriter this week.

So I had a chance to meet and hear Mike Rich talk a few months ago. He's the screenwriter of movies like Finding Forrester, The Rookie, Secretariat, Radio, certainly done a lot of writing work on other films that he hasn't been credited for. But here's what he said when I was talking to him. And he said, always have a story that you are working on that's just for you.

Now, I think that's really interesting advice. And as usual, I'm really tempted to talk about that. Talk about the benefits of it, why it's great to do, how you should do it.

But I'm going to, I'm going to hold off from doing that and let that stand on its own. Always have a story you're working on that's just for you. So with that, I'm hoping to be back next week. If not, like I said, I've got that surgery coming up. Not a big deal.

So it's not anything to worry about if I'm not here next week. It just means that I didn't have time to get the show produced. But I think we'll be fine.

So I will look forward to seeing you next week. Until then, remember, the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do. And I hope 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 show's website. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.

But until then, join the conversation at the show's website.