In this chapter of Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott doesn’t have too much to say about dialogue, other than it’s difficult to master, but worth it. This is true.
Unlike other elements of writing, there’s no trick to mastering it, other than practice. If you don’t know how to plot, you can rely on the hero’s journey to get started, but there’s no mathematical formula to dialogue. It either sounds right or it doesn’t. However, there are a few useful pieces of advice to help you start.
Do Your Homework
The first is observe, observe, observe. If you’re not paying attention to how real people talk in real life, you won’t be able to reproduce speech in writing. Think about important people in your life. Try to hear their voices in your head. Some, like your parents or an important teacher, will come to mind more easily. Others may take more time. Spend some time meditating and journaling to bring these people back to the present. Write down funny things they said and do you best to get it verbatim. Write some journal entries as if they were writing about their own lives. Do you remember your mother talking about her mother, or your father telling you about his childhood friends? Pull those memories up and steal use those voices in your writing.
You’ll hear advice about eavesdropping, which is a good practice, but insufficient. In my experience, people are too guarded in conversation, especially in public. However, I do encourage this idea in concept. Observation takes practice, and you will occasionally hear a juicy bit of dialogue you might use or something that prompts an idea for a story or character.
When you practice eavesdropping for the first time, you might feel like you don’t notice anything. People may seem bland, their conversations dull. I believe that’s normal for most of us, because we don’t know yet what we’re looking for and we don’t know what to do with what we find. You might have encountered this feeling if you have practiced visual observation. The mundane objects and views you experience every day seem too unimportant to write down. You will probably feel the same way about the boring, everyday chit-chat you overhear in public.
But practice. Write down everything you see and hear, even if you think it’s boring, even if you can’t imagine using it in a story. If you still struggle, start smaller. Describe the sounds you hear – the register, the clink of dishes and cutlery, chairs scraping the floor, what music is playing. Listen to people ordering and write down how customers and staff interact. If you make yourself write down even the boring stuff, eventually your mindset will shift. You’ll attune your ear to hear what stands out. Who asks questions? Who is friendly or rude? Who overshares personal details with a stranger?
You aren’t likely to write too many scenes of people ordering snacks in a coffee house, but the point isn’t what you hear. The point is training yourself to listen. Go outside, find a place where people have conversations, listen, and write down what intrigues you. You might hear an interesting turn of phrase or a story of romantic woe or family conflict. Listen to the way people use half sentences and fragments, interrupt each other, finish each other’s sentences. If you can observe without being observed, note how people use their bodies in conversation. Do they talk with their hands, make eye contact, act out their stories? What do their facial expressions say? Does the emotion match the speech or do you sense something is off?
For more advanced practice, visit with interesting people. In addition to hearing natural speech, you’ll hear some great stories and – more importantly – experience how the person tells the story. What details do they share? What do they leave out? What topics to they avoid? Do they get to the point or meander? Do they digress or tell three or four stories at once, one buried in the next like a Russian nesting doll? If you don’t know any astronauts or former political prisoners, listen to interviews. Audio books of memoirs read by their authors are another good – though not perfect – tool. Oral histories are better.
Some writing gurus will recommend watching great movies or television to get an ear for good dialogue. I’m not a great fan of this approach. If I absorb too much of another writer’s work, I start to mimic them in my writing. If you can learn but not mimic, however, this can be a good method for learning. Approach the project with a pen in hand and pause the movie to write down your observations and how the writer tackled different challenges. But remember – be yourself. If you try to write dialogue like Quentin Tarantino’s, your work will sound like someone trying to sound like Tarantino. An authentic you is far superior to an ersatz somebody else.
Dialogue in practice
As a practical rule, you should avoid having your characters say exactly what they feel or want, until you have them at a breaking point. For the most part, conversation is more oblique than that. We hedge, we suggest, we canoodle, but we rarely come out and ask for what we want. We approach it, back away, edge forward a bit, nudge our listener towards our point. That push and pull can be greatly exacerbated when two people have a relationship or when there is a power imbalance.
Don’t let your characters restate the plot – “We are going to climb the mountain!” – or share backstory with dialogue – the dreaded “As you know, Steve…” mistake. If the characters already know information, they won’t talk about it. If you reader needs to know something, find another way to bring it out. This is why every television drama set in a hospital includes an intern arriving for their first day on the job, or every cop show has a rookie. Use a character who doesn’t know certain details as a stand-in for the reader.
Once you’ve finished a story, read it aloud. Your tongue will trip over bad dialogue – you will hear when your character is repeating himself or talking for too long. You’ll hear when she’s stating the obvious or not showing the right or right amount of emotion. You may not know exactly how to fix it, but you’ll hear bad dialogue.
Dialect
Most writing advice will tell you to avoid dialect, and most writers should, simply because they don’t make the effort to write it well. Dialect is not impossible to pull off, but it requires observation and practice.
Don’t be lazy. We all love Star Trek, but if your only exposure to a Scottish accent is James Doohan, all your characters are going to sound like Scotty. You probably don’t have to immerse yourself in a culture, unless the character and dialect is crucial to your story. But do spend time listening and observing.
Movies are a good reference, but real life is better. Documentaries, reality shows, YouTube videos, and podcasts – regardless of topic – are a great way to quickly hear a variety of people speaking in their everyday voices. Depending on the accent you wish to convey, you might have to research a bit, but that’s better than having your Irish character say “Faith and Begorra!” every time he appears.
Listen not just for the accent, but the rhythm of the speech, turns of phrase, and slang. Ultimately, the better you know the character beneath the accent, the more naturally his or her voice will come through to you.
Don’t overdo it. Unless your name is Mark Twain, you should avoid the over use of dialect, and in Twain’s case, it’s too late, because he’s dead. On behalf of every middle school kid who ever had to read Jim’s dialogue aloud to even have a prayer of deciphering the dialect, I respectfully ask that you use it sparingly.
If you choose to use dialect, sprinkle it in. A few key phrases or idioms will give the reader context clues about the character’s speech. Similarly, you can use dialect to introduce your character, then drop it. The reader will remember what the person is supposed to sound like.
Instead of tortured spelling, use grammar and syntax in an interesting way to convey the character’s speech. Consider Yoda’s unique phrasing. The character has a distinctive voice, but if you were writing him in prose, your spelling would be straightforward. Understanding how sentences are structured in languages other than English can help you recreate the rhythm and flow of how someone learning the language might talk.