On Writing Lifelike Dialogue

When my first book, Doorman Wanted, came out, I received many compliments from book club members about the book’s dialogue. They found it funny, crisp, and lifelike. Lifelike!

“What do you mean by that?” I asked the first person who used that term.

“I don’t know. It was just like the way, you know, real people—us, we—talk, not book characters. I just found it, like, just… lifelike.”

(6 Screenwriting Tips to Improve Your Novel.)

Articulation aside, a bigger compliment I could not have received, primarily because the authors I most enjoy are those who have sparkling dialogue. My entire professional career was built upon writing words intended to be read out loud. Over the course of 40 years, I was a television news producer, a public television producer, and a corporate video and events producer. Everything I wrote was intended not for the written page, but for the teleprompter, ultimately to be spoken aloud either by news anchors or corporate CEOs.

One of the greatest early lessons I received was from my first news anchor in Green Bay. He said, “Glenn, you write as if you’re writing for a newspaper. When I read your stories, I sound stilted. Make it conversational. I want the viewers to think they’re hearing gossip from the next-door neighbor.” It was one of the best writing tips I ever received.

Since that day, everything I write I read out loud, including my full novels. I can’t catch stilted dialogue by reading it silently. It’s not until I read it out loud—multiple times—that I’m able to catch stiff, unnatural speaking rhythms. Once I’m happy with the dialogue sections, I then read it to my wife. Invariably, she catches things I’ve missed. The out-loud reading—both by myself and to an audience—is critical in writing authentic dialogue.

And here’s the thing about the way we talk. We speak in partial sentences. We start in one direction, interrupt ourselves, and go off in another direction. We grunt, we purr, we mutter, we blurt, but something we rarely do is speak in grammatically perfect sentences. Whenever I see an exchange of that type of dialogue, it rarely rings true and I suspect the author has not actually heard the dialogue spoken out loud.

The other thing that we humans do—and, so too, should characters—is we’re constantly cutting in on each other. Someone starts a sentence, the listener gets swept up in what is being communicated and jumps in, possibly finishing the thought or taking it in an entirely different direction. In the world of show-don’t-tell, dialogue is one of a writer’s most useful tools in helping convey character. Is the character funny? Smart? Irreverent? Kind? Cocky? Depressed? Exuberant? All of these qualities can be conveyed through a deft use of dialogue.

Another element of human speech is all of us have “handles.” That is, those little pet phrases or sounds we make. The writer is taught to avoid cliches or trite phrases but, like it or not, we humans constantly speak in them. We end sentences with the emphasizing words “right?” or “okay?” or “know what I mean?” We often start a sentence with “So,” or “Well…” We overuse horrible corporate-speak phrases like “at the end of the day” and we often use warm-up phrases before we get to the kernel of the truth within a sentence, such as “Well, I’m not going to lie to you…” All of these handles should be regarded as salt: Use just the right amount and it brings forth the flavor you’re seeking, use too much and it ruins the stew.

For the reader, dialogue also provides pacing. The comedian—and, now, author—Nate Bargatze makes the joke that the problem with books is that there are so many words. You turn the page and there are just more… words. The shtick always gets a laugh, but I suspect Bargatze has read neither Thomas Bernhard, who refrains from providing paragraph breaks, nor Jonathan Coe, who famously—or, infamously—wrote a nearly 14,000-word sentence in The Rotters Club before rediscovering the period key on his laptop. Words, indeed.

So, yes, to help Mr. Bargatze with a novel’s “wordiness” issue, dialogue provides pacing. While narrative serves its purpose as setting a scene or providing backstory among other things, dialogue immediately pulls the reader into the present moment. We become part of the conversation.

There are many authors who capture dialogue in brilliant fashion. One of my favorites is the author Elmore Leonard. Beyond simple, compelling, plots, Leonard provides dialogue that leaps off the page. He wastes little time in providing character description. His philosophy was, who cares whether the protagonist is wearing a red or blue shirt, parts her hair on the left or right, or has a small scar on her shoulder. “Let the damn reader do some work,” he said. Leonard’s character descriptions lived within the characters’ spoken words. I know exactly what Stick looks like in Swag because of the way he talks and the way others talk to him.

Another brilliant dialogist is the author Richard Price (Clockers, The Lush Life). Like Leonard’s, Price’s characters come to life through dialogue. In her review of The Lush Life, the New York Time’s book critic, Michiko Kakutani said, “No one writes better dialogue than Richard Price—not Elmore Leonard, not David Mamet, not even David Chase.” In my universe, Leonard and Price stand atop the same first-place podium.

Kakutani brings up an important point, however, in her review by mentioning Mamet and Chase, one primarily known for stage plays, the other for television series. I fall into a slim minority of individuals who enjoys reading stage plays, whether or not I’m familiar with the play itself, which gets me back to my original point. Playwrights and screen writers write not to be read, but for their words to be performed—to be spoken aloud. For the novelist intent on improving their writing of dialogue, studying the leading voices of film and theater can be extremely useful. By definition, stage scripts prove to be the most authentic form of human interaction. Lifelike, some might even say.

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