If you’re writing a scene with dialogue, it can be tempting to have the conversation follow a very logical flow, what writer Samsun Knight describes as a “call and response” method. But that’s usually a mistake. When people talk to each other, they rarely answer each others questions directly, and non sequiturs are common. Knight says:
In reality, nobody ever talks to anyone else. What speech actually achieves is a communication between one person and that person’s idea of the other. Most of the time there is no difference, no discernible difference, between such verisimilitude and the truth. But the best dialogue will manifest this disparity in subtle, slender ways. It will show how, in speaking, we fail to speak.
Read more about Knight’s insights into realistic dialogue in the latest Glimmer Train bulletin.
For more writing inspiration:
- Jennifer Egan: I Knew
- Spencer Hyde: Find Your Voice
- Or review the latest Glimmer Train bulletin
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
I avidly follow your customarily helpful articles, filled with useful, practical information. But this particular one on “writing realistic dialogue” is disappointing. It seeks to set arbitrarily constraining guidelines that rule out notably superior and highly successful writers. This may be due to an unstated genera problem of some sort — that you have in mind one type of writing while I deal most routinely with another. Two quick examples (who both excelled at writing dialogue): David Mamet and Noel Coward. If either one of these two extremely different writers, who nonetheless worked in the same field (theater), were to have read and taken to heart what you’re suggesting here, I believe they would have concluded that their natural inclinations, which later on developed into the distinctly different styles for which each became famous, were seriously flawed and misguided. That would have been a great loss. What do you think?
Hello Plainsmann – I’m sharing insights here from another writer, which I find to be useful, but not by any means a rule that ought to be applied restrictively. I do agree there is likely a genre issue at play. For me, Mamet & Coward = writing for stage or screen (rather than the page), so I’d say you’re looking at this advice through quite a different lens.
In any case, no matter what kind of writing advice you read, it’s always possible to find people who either transcend the so-called rules or break the rules. That’s what experienced or talented writers do.
Thank you so much, Jane Friedman — and for the record I subscribe to your blogs because they are so carefully considered, professionally informed, and practical. My ‘lens’ is undoubtedly affected by my many years of professional involvement in theater as both an actor and playwright; and particularly as one whose personal emphasis is on musical theater in probably its most difficult period so far, I didn’t want it to appear as somehow having less of a place than the long-standing tradition of which it is surely a part. With gratitude for your efforts in furthering the development of those writing in the arts,
Gene
I liked Knight’s piece and didn’t interpret it as being prescriptive. When a writer makes the reader work a bit to interpret literary fiction, the result can be more gratifying to some types of readers while alienating others. As a reader, I prefer not to be spoon-fed, but I’m sure my taste isn’t mainstream. I often wish it were.
Knight says right things. It’s pretty hard to write a realistic dialogue and make everything natural.