I’m not a thief, at least not in the strict sense of the term. I’ve never hotwired a car, dine-and-dashed, or slipped out of Wal-Mart with an unpurchased pack of gum. But often, when I sit down to write, I find myself referencing a stack of the same well-worn college textbooks and class notes. It feels like cheating, somehow, to work from other people’s ideas, even though learning other people’s ideas was the point of my education.
Sometimes, writing dialogue feels the same way: When it’s straight from my head it’s boring. When it’s interesting, I feel like I’ve stolen it from someone else.
Recently, I had an epiphany. Where the fine line falls between “I learned this and I’m sharing it” and “I’m a terrible person who steals ideas” certainly depends on whether you cite your sources, but it also relies on our need for creative backup. My constant referral to a catalogue of other people’s ideas is an admission. I see truth in the art you create: in your understanding of a complex idea, in your portrayal of an overwhelming emotion, in the way the light plays across her face. I see the truth in your art, and it calls me to a higher standard in my own art. As long as there’s no shady copy-and-paste business or convenient omission of citations, building from other’s ideas creates a pathway to better art. So, with the admission that all my ideas had their root in someone else’s creative work, here are four dialogue techniques I stole straight from my undergrad courses: want, sound, theft, and syntax.
Steal the Power of “Want”
My undergrad major was in theater, and theater people have an obsession with this thing called “want.” “What does your character want right now?” “What does this make Bill want to do?” “How does this help Jasmine get what she wants?” We give ourselves brownie points every time we can shoehorn the word into a sentence. “Want” is at the heart of every good piece of writing, especially in dialogue. Without a “want,” nothing your character does makes sense.
Freshman year, I took a course in playwriting. And I was terrible at it. I had read so many books, I knew what sounded eloquent or clever or emotional, and that was how I tried to write my characters. I had missed one of the main lessons of the course: everything a character does is driven by what he wants. Everything she says—and everything she doesn’t say—stems from her goals.
One of our main playwriting textbooks was Writing Your First Play by Roger A. Hall, who wrote, “In some ways dialogue is a trap. . . . We run the danger as writers of concentrating only on the words and forgetting the significance of the action, the conflict, and the characters. Good dialogue should be a means for a character to accomplish an end” (38). I had fallen headlong into the trap; my inane dialogue did nothing to push the plot forward and crippled my story’s ability to go anywhere. Playwright David Ball likes to put it this way: “A human being thinks many things never spoken. From the many things one thinks, one selects what to say according to what one wants. Put another way: if you want nothing, you say nothing” (28). Every line of dialogue should arise from your character’s goals.
Steal Sound from Shakespeare
It’s easy to relegate the importance of sound to plays, poetry, and maybe those authors who do book readings. Why does the sound of a novel matter if people are just going to read it silently? But when we read, we hear. Our minds don’t just translate those squiggles into meaning; the squiggles play in our heads before we understand them, and the way they sound carries a lot of weight.
My sophomore year, I enrolled in Voice and Diction, a course geared to teaching breath control, elocution, and the basics of dialects. It was the loudest class I’ve ever been in. Exercises included running in circles until it was your turn to say a line, bellowing lines across the room, and leaping onto nearby objects to add emphasis to a line. All this chaos to prove it’s not enough to write eloquent words; the way they sound matters, too.
We spent hours in class studying Shakespearean monologues, looking for the sounds he built into the text and how those sounds enhanced meaning. The balance of vowels to consonants, how sentences start and end, and the repetition of sounds all set a tone for dialogue. If you look at Ophelia’s monologue in Hamlet Act 3, scene 1, you see the sounds working together with the words to create a dirge of sorts, long vowels piling on top of each other to emulate a wailing sound.
Oh, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword;
In Hamlet’s famous “To Be” monologue just a few pages earlier, we see almost the inverse principle applied.
To be, or not to be? That is the question—
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them?
The hard first syllable gives Hamlet’s speech an attack, and as you read through the piece, you notice a lot of hard consonants. These sounds give Hamlet something to bite into and produce a bit of angst, and they also play into his persona of insanity. You can only spit out so many hard consonants in a row before you start sounding a little unhinged. But there are sections (Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune) that are nearly as soft and vowel-driven as Ophelia’s lament, and this dichotomy, too, uses sound to present Hamlet as a picture of instability. The sound of the words reinforces what he says.
Steal Words from Friends
My first creative writing course drove home to me the power of theft. I discovered the method when I was trying to craft insults, a talent I apparently do not have. Desperate for something that didn’t sound straight from Ramona Quimby’s mouth, I begged a retired Marine Sergeant Major friend to help me. The long, colorful list of insults he supplied (in a frighteningly short time span) opened up a whole new world to me.
I knew, of course, that dialogue needs to sound like real people talking. But it had never occurred to me to steal straight from people I knew. I spent hours trying to make a character sound like an authentic World War II vet, when I could have called my dad and asked him how Grandpa talked or what TV shows he’d liked. Despite all your writing prowess, sometimes the line that really lands is the one you heard in a Starbucks four years ago, or the one your wife mutters under her breath when you leave the toilet seat up. If you’re stuck on a character’s line, attitude, or turn of phrase, think of someone you know who reminds you of the character and ask what they would say.
Steal Syntax from Mamet
Senior year I took another playwriting class, hoping to redeem myself from the horrible job I’d done freshman year. With three years of theater, literature, and writing courses under my belt, I understood the workings of story structure far better and decided to hone in on dialogue.
In the theater world, David Mamet is considered a dialogue master. Far from the elevated language of Shakespeare or Wilde, Mamet captures speech patterns with impressive realism. I studied Mamet’s play Oleanna to find what it was about his work that sounded so natural to the ear, and found a rhythm of speech that mimics a chaotic dance as characters vie for power. Oleanna epitomizes the power play of dialogue, showing a commanding collegiate professor who, over the course of three acts, loses his power to a student accusing him of sexual misconduct. Mamet uses speech habits and interplay—and the way they shift throughout the play—to embody the contest of wills happening onstage.
Speech habits form the surface level of dialogue dynamics, and they exist isolated from a specific scene. These habits come from how a character interacts regardless of her situation. What level is her vocabulary? Can he string a long sentence together coherently, or does he tend to use short, disjointed phrases as he pieces thoughts together? Does she process externally, or does she have to think before she can respond? People who feel more comfortable in their communication skills or in a specific situation tend to hold more control over any conversation, simply due to their confidence.
Dialogue interplay, however, relies entirely on situation and, consequently, tells the reader far more about the relationships between characters. See who holds the power in a conversation by looking at interruptions. Oleanna opens with the professor, John, talking over and interrupting everything his student, Carol, says. As the play progresses, the power shifts. By the third act, Carol talks over John and ignores his attempts to interrupt.
Another contextual key in dialogue is how the characters respond to each other—or whether they do at all. Alongside interruptions, the controlling personality in a conversation frequently ignores the content of the other person’s contributions. In this excerpt from the first act of Oleanna, Mamet uses John’s dismissal of Carol to establish his dominance over the situation.
JOHN. I know how... believe me. I know how... potentially humiliating these... I have no desire to... I have no desire other than to help you. But: I don’t even say “but.” I’ll say that as I go back over the...
CAROL. I’m just, I’m just trying to...
JOHN. ...no, it will not do.
CAROL. ...what? What will...?
JOHN. No. I see, I see what you, it... but your work...
CAROL. I just: I sit in class I... I take notes...
JOHN. Yes. I understand. What I am trying to tell you is that some, some basic...
CAROL. ...I...
JOHN. ...one moment: some basic missed communi...
CAROL. I’m doing what I’m told. I bought your book, I read your...
JOHN. No, I’m sure you... (Mamet 9-10)
The way these characters speak and interact with each other demonstrates what they want and who’s in charge.
Dialogue exists in a tension of wills, and not in a vacuum. As I painfully discovered my freshman year, strong and truthful dialogue has to be rooted in the ways real people talk, not just in how they sound in my head. And much as I’d like to think I have some innate power to grit my teeth and dead-lift myself to better writing, my writing won’t improve without resources to refer to like the well-worn stack of books on my desk. Cite your sources faithfully, but don’t be ashamed of those books you can’t stop referencing or the friends you pester for ideas. The sooner we embrace the collaborative necessity of creative work, the sooner we move past our own limitations to create art bigger than ourselves.
Works Cited
Ball, David. Backwards and Forwards: a Technical Manual for Reading Plays. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.
Hall, Roger A. Writing Your First Play. New York, NY: Focal Press, 2013.
Mamet, David. Oleanna. New York, NY: Dramatist's Play Service, INC., 1992.
Callie Johnson works as Editorial Assistant at Kelli Sallman Writing and Editing with a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts and Creative Writing from Calvary University. She previously interned with Kelli for two years, working as proofreader and copyeditor on several manuscripts. Her strange obsessions include kerning, East Coker, and the sound of cows chewing.