In both fictional and nonfictional contexts, well-written dialogue can convey character, mood, and intention, as well as relationship dynamics and social tensions. When writing dialogue, I find it helpful to remember that spoken language is carried by the breath, which imbues it with a kind of living, amorphous, ephemeral quality. But how do we write dialogue that effectively breathes?
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The Conversastion - Edouard Vuillard (1891)
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A.M. Homes is a fantastic writer of dialogue. Consider this scene from her story "Raft in Water, Floating," about a disaffected, possibly anorexic teenage girl and her sense that she's growing invisible or disappearing:
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Inside there is a noise, a flash of light.
"Shit!" her mother yells.
She gets up. She opens the sliding glass door. "What happened?"
"I flicked the switch and the bulb blew."
She steps inside—cool white, goose bumps.
"I dropped the plant," her mother says. She has dropped an African violet on its head. "I couldn't see where I was going." She has a blue gel pack strapped to her face. "Headache."
There is dark soil on the carpet. She goes to get the Dustbuster. The television in the kitchen is on, even though no one is watching: "People often have the feeling there is something wrong, that they are not where they should be...."
The dirt is in a small heap, a tiny hill on the powder-blue carpet. In her white crocheted bathing suit, she gets down on her hands and knees and sucks it up. Her mother watches. And then her mother gets down and brushes the carpet back and forth. "Did you get it?" she asks. "Did you get it all?"
"All gone," she says.
"I dropped it on its head," her mother says. "I can't bear it. I need to be reminded of beauty," she says. "Beauty is a comfort, a reminder that good things are possible. And I killed it."
"It's not dead," she says. "It's just upside down." Her mother is tall, like a long thin line, like a root going down.
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Horace Pippin - Sunday Morning Breakfast (1943)
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Note first that where plain speech will do, Homes lets it be. "Shit!" "What happened?" and "I flicked the switch and the bulb blew," are all super simple, straightfoward bits of dialogue. They help set the scene, yes, but this bare bones dialogue also alerts us to the fact that mother and daughter are able to communicate in quick snatches. They may not have the greatest relationship, but it's not formal, stiff, or furious.
The next words out of the mother's mouth, if you string them together, read: "I dropped the plant. I couldn't see where I was going. Headache."
We aren't told that the girl has looked, perhaps inquisitively, at the ice pack on her mother's face, yet we understand this to be the case because of the way Homes has ordered things (dialogue-image of ice pack on face-one word explanation).
The next bit of speech, though not technically dialogue, arrives via the television, which announces in the clearest possible terms (and the most poetically metaphorical manner) the story's central theme of disembodiment.
Homes then allows the mother a rather high-toned philosophical insight. This could easily sound staged, but the dialogue that brackets it is so natural that it instead comes off as a convincing moment of thoughtful pathos.
Unsuccessful dialogue will often resort to a predictable back and forth rhythm. Character A says X, to which Character B responds Y, to which Character A says X1, and so on. This is nothing at all like the way we speak in life. Notice how Homes avoids the A-B-A trap by allowing dialogue to surface at unpredictable intervals, often in the form of non-sequiturs. The words of both mother and daughter crop up like weird, slightly surreal mushrooms of thought. Through what they say to one another, we begin to understand not only their relationship, but their individual states of mind as well.
A great way to hone your dialogue skills is to eavesdrop carefully and often. Really listen to the way people talk, the way they both reveal and hide themselves with words. If possible, record the dialogue in a notebook—seeing it written down will bring the surprises into sharper focus. I guarantee, the non-sequiturs alone will knock your socks off. Pay special attention to the real life way we occasionally weave poetic, philosophical, or otherwise high tone sentences into our much more pedestrian, pass-the-salt kind of speech. Even very young children do this regularly.
In upcoming Write On newsletters, I'll focus on two more essential aspects of writing dialogue—context and attribution. Until then, happy eavesdropping.
Kim Adrian
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