Six Weeks of Favorite Writing Prompts: Week #6, Dialogue

This week, I encourage you to listen. To listen to people’s conversations wherever you are. Best are doctor’s offices, airport waiting areas, busses, coffeeshops, anyplace people are engaged with each other and letting the conversation rip.

That—and the prompt below—will teach you tons about writing dialogue for fiction or memoir. And about how different the real-life conversations are!

I've learned that writing good dialogue for story requires is an ability to listen between the lines of what you overhear in real life. In other words, dialogue on the page is all about the subtext. What’s not said, but what speaks louder than the words.

Want a great example? Check out the classic Hemingway short story, “Hills Like White Elephants.”

Here’s the story: A man and a woman are sitting in a cafe in a train station somewhere in Spain. They are having drinks and waiting. The woman remarks that the distant hills look like white elephants. The dialogue is somewhat inane, if you just look at it line by line, but taken as a whole it reveals this huge subject that's not being discussed, a subject that's quite profound. The man wants the woman to have an abortion. She is resisting, and in that resistance is the whole of their relationship.

Subtext!

So, the punch of the story is far from what they're discussing outwardly, what the words say. It's all about what can't be discussed--whether she is truly loved and whether he is seeing her beneath everything that is happening in their lives. A situation that speaks of anger, misunderstanding, and profound despair, in my mind.

As you study this story, you start to see the layers peel away to reveal that subtext.

First layer is the obvious--they are ordering drinks, the drink tastes like anise, the hills are like elephants seen faintly through the trees.

Then there's the main topic--the abortion that the man is advocating.

It’s Hemingway's brilliance that brings in the third layer, the meat of this tiny story: what's not fixable about us humans, about people's twists and turns and their basic unhappiness with what they end up with.

This week’s prompt lets you try it yourself.

Your weekly writing exercise

Find a busy place to sit for a while with your writer's notebook or laptop or phone so you can take notes on how people talk.

Write down all the jigs and jags of human speech. Note the rhythm, the half-finished sentences, the abrupt change of subject. How many times people interrupt or talk around the topic. You’re listening for the outer speech but also the subtext, what’s not being said.

Read what you've captured. Underline the best three lines, the ones that hint at subtext. Using one of these, begin a 10-minute free write (no editing). Write the overheard line of dialogue at the top of your page and start adding responses until you've crafted a conversation.

Study it for possible ideas and use in your own story. Decide what's not being said (the subtext). Is it a strong current under your characters' words?

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash