This Will Change How You Write Dialogue Forever

Lesson 1 of “How REAL Humans Talk!” dialogue writing essentials with Lauren Veloski

By our favorite artist Mariam Chagelishvili

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Hello, Human Talkers Who Also Write! Yes, you! Welcome to Lesson #1 of “How REAL Humans Talk!” I’m thrilled to get you rolling around in the mud with the beautiful MESS that is two or more humans … attempting conversation (what madness!). Across the next 4 weeks, you’re going to learn how to write flawlessly fucked-up, halting, gorgeously messy, and staggeringly REAL dialogue!

Why does dialogue matter to your writing? Glad you asked. Dialogue that HASN’T been trained on real human conversation is maybe your biggest liability. It’s often the weakest link in an otherwise beautiful work—flowing prose interrupted by robot stiff diction, or a cloyingly poetic turn of phrase.

But when we nail authentic “voice,” we DEEPEN investment in our fictional world, reflect our readers back to themselves, pop champagne, and celebrate the gnarly mess that is humanity! To get to that authenticity, you and I will: 1). Investigate how we can use our LIVED EXPERIENCES as actual humans who talk all the time in real life—and are thus natural experts!—to shape how our fictional humans talk in fictional stories. 2). We’ll read and watch loads of vivid examples from pop culture, to bring the lessons home with heart and oomph. My big goal: I want you to sashay out of the month of January feeling like a conversational GOD on the page. WAY more confident and exploratory in your dialogue writing than ever before. A Chatty Cathy badass, practically burping speech bubbles.

I’m Lauren Veloski and I’m a screenwriter, comedy writer, and the founder of THAT’S BANANAS. I teach screenwriting courses year-round (including many at Write or Die) and work as a coach with writers of ALL modes: short story writers, novelists, screenwriters, comedy writers, memoirists, playwrights, you name it. Before I started teaching and coaching, I spent 15+ years as the “story doctor” in the room on loads of film & TV projects. I was brought in to fix narrative problems, to find the funny, to make it weird, to make scenes go ka-boom, and most importantly: to shape the dialogue into something chiseled and powerful, but flawlessly authentic.

Whatever you love to write—fiction, plays, creative nonfiction, sketch comedy, recipes!—I believe that a screenwriting lens is a the perfect “in” for radical dialogue work, because dialogue is THE dominant tool of the screenwriter.

In our 4 weeks, we’ll be looking at fab/fun examples from some of your favorite films & TV shows, including:

• Snaggle-toothed bitch slap arguments in “THE BEAR”

• Mom-daughter toxicity in “LADY BIRD”

• Symphonic crosstalk in Greta Gerwig’s “LITTLE WOMEN”

• Rich boy retributive justice in “THE SOCIAL NETWORK”

Let’s use this dank, frigid January to muscle-up the dialogue component of whatever it is you want to create. If you walk away from this Forever Workshop with a new electricity in your dialogue writing, EXCITED AS HELL to explore the wacky entirely of the human predicament and its blabbering-blathering: I’ve done my job! And you can always ask questions or bounce ideas off me in the Comments—I’m here to support you!

Our plan of attack:

First, I want to acknowledge that the subject of dialogue in creative writing is VAST. In screenwriting alone, it could constitute an entire year of a dramatic writing MFA. There are countless angles and nooks and crannies. We could spend a month just looking at dialect and slang, or the curve of more mannered speech through history and genre—Jane Austen witticisms, or the thudding brute speech in action films. We could focus JUST on comedy or JUST on drama, because they do each utilize unique hat tricks. 

But this is a 4-week workshop, so my inclination is to bring it all back to YOU. I want you writing in ways that are first and foremost obliterating sameness—because ONLY YOU could have written these things! 

Naturally, your singular, super-duper specific P.O.V becomes extra crystalline in dialogue writing, where so many of your personal “hot takes” on humanity inevitably seep through the conversations you write. You have exponentially more power as a writer of fiction when you’ve mastered the dialogue game AND know your unique take on humans.

Let’s dive in!

Lesson #1: GREAT Dialogue Vs. Garbage Dialogue.

First up, we establish some clear guardrails around what propulsive dialogue writing demands. And let’s do that by defining what great dialogue is NOT!

1) Great dialogue is not …

• Polished or academic (unless that IS the character’s defining contrivance) 

• Self-consciously poetic

• Inert (if no subtext)

• Expertly edited like prose (for its descriptive beauty), &/or removed from the character’s immediate experience

• On the nose/exposition

• Omniscient 

• Hallmarky / “pearls of wisdom”

• Mismatched voice

Fun-but-cautionary examples of each of the above:

Polished

MOLLY

The detritus in my bedroom requires I allocate a full day for focused cleaning. 

RYAN

I’d extend my labor as assistance, but I’m afraid my house is in a parallel situation. We are “doom” itself.

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On the nose/exposition

MOLLY

I want to love you, Ryan. Even though you’re my boss and it’s wrong because it conflicts with my morals. But I can’t love you truly in my heart until you call your wife of 15 years, Judith, and tell her it’s over. 

RYAN

My wife of 15 years, whose name is Janice actually, is at that work retreat in Napa. I told you that yesterday, remember? So “tomorrow” is now “tonight.” She’s there until Sunday. But let me pick of the phone and I’ll call her and finally end it, after 15 years of marriage. I feel fine about this. Good idea. This plan is great, Molly. I’m doing it now. Here I go. I’m picking up the phone. I betcha she’ll be mad as hell.

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Self-consciously poetic

MOLLY

My sleep these days is like … the bloom of a peony gone to utter wreckage.

RYAN

My heart bleats for your burden. I am a macaw in the wind!

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Inert (screenplay format)

INT. LIVING ROOM  -  DAY

Molly and Ryan want nothing from each other currently, nor do they have any past or any future. There is no tension, and there are no needs here. 

MOLLY

Not now, but at some point I’ll have to clean my bedroom. As you obviously see, it’s a mess in here. 

RYAN

Yep, I see that. I’m looking at it right now.

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Expertly edited like prose (for its descriptive beauty), &/or removed from the character’s immediate life experience

MOLLY

Living here in this old house, I feel the oppression of a thousand false starts. Women at their prime, weighed down by cleaning chores and screaming children. It’s not in the walls, nor in the water, but it’s ringing through my body day in and out.

RYAN

I’d hear you better if I wasn’t slumped over from a day of soul-besmirching work, a cog in the wheel of capitalism. My trousers have the scruffy quality of mouse skin, don’t they? My ears are hardly better.

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Omniscient

MOLLY

10 years from now, you’ll have forgotten about me, wisely, and go on to love a true soulmate. I will never love again though. Goodbye, my favorite mistake.

RYAN

We’ve just been projections to each other. I agree. When I met you I was desperate and deluded. A child.

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Hallmarky / “pearls of wisdom”

MOLLY

The best love story is the one we write together.

RYAN

Molly, you are my today and all of my tomorrows. Kiss me?

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Mismatched voice

TIMMY (age 5): In kindergarten today, I was really taken off guard by our watercolor assignment. We were given pastel paints, rather than primary colors, and the effect was pretty infantilizing. When I complained to Mrs. Shelby, she told me I could “show myself out.” Humph. 

DAD (age 45): Dude, don’t even sweat it! Ladies be showing dudes out constantly. I saw your pastel and I think it’s SWEEEEET as all fuck.

*These are all over-written to comedic affect, both for your amusement and to really hit the point over the head!*

2) Now, let’s establish what GREAT (real) dialogue is!

When speaking ace dialogue, your characters are almost always (consciously or unconsciously) doing one of these things:

• Hiding

• Gloating

• Lying

• Pretending

• Avoiding

• Disguising

• Conflating

• Confusing 

• Appeasing

• Flirting

• Minimizing

• Amplifying

• Pacifying

• Alluding to

• Provoking

You and I do all of the above shady stuff in real life too (we do!), despite angelic intentions. So when you choose one of these messier frames for your characters’ dialogue, it immediately grounds your story in reality, sharpens your character’s specificity, reveals deeper motivations, hints at narrative trajectory, complicates or creates tension, births breakthroughs, heightens story stakes, muddles goals, subverts desires … all the good stuff!

Remember also that characters are often “coming or going” when we find them in conversation—maybe even hoping to escape the other person they’re stuck talking to (this can be true even in intimate relationships, i.e.: a deathly silent dinner in a marriage that’s run cold). So ask yourself: Do my characters want “in or out” of this conversation? The answer will change the cadence of your writing, might dip your people into some disingenuous bullshit banter to fill the time, or might hurry them past hard truths. RARELY are we entirely suspended in time in a conversation, with no ticking clock, destination, or next event. Life keeps happening. When you keep a writerly eye on the “real life” that could have happened just before, or will happen just after, a particular fictional convo: you mold it in the shape of real life.

Speaking of the shape of real life, in your real life have you noticed how often the thing you’re talking about is not really the thing you’re talking about? This brings us to the third core component of great dialogue, that essential life-giver …

3). Subtext!

I’m of the opinion that you already know how to write subtext, because we humans employ subtext every day, because life is full to the brim with metaphor and unavoidable near-misses, but also because many of us spend most of our time on earth pointedly not saying what we really mean. As a species, we’re avoiders!

So my guidelines for subtext-enriching your writing are less a “recipe,” and more a checklist to help you remember how humans obfuscate, go petty (focus on the miniscule, versus the deep), and hide. You already know how to do it!

If you refer to our above list of “What great (REAL) dialogue actually is,” you’ll notice that everything in that list is a tool of subtext. Even “amplifying” or “provoking” (which sound straight-forward) can be subtexty—for example, someone amplifies their argument to distract from something far more vulnerable. We conniving creatures have myriad tactics!

Now it’s Sexy Cinema Time:

Let’s jump into an illuminating example of subtext as your and my favorite hot priest breaks Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s heart wide open in the “bus stop scene” from FLEABAG’s final episode:

Go grab a fist-full of Kleenex, watch that sparkler of a scene, snot it out, THEN let’s talk about what we just saw happen.

False floors

I love to think of subtext as “false floors.” Steal this from me, it’s super helpful! Imagine a modern, recently renovated kitchen. At our eye-level, the floor is a new layer of gleaming tile. But beneath that, a wooden floor from the 1980s still hides. Below that, the old, raggedy subfloor from the house’s original 1940s construction. Below that, the beams that support all the floors. Below those? Just air and soil.

So what we want to ask ourselves in order to write the BEST version of a conversation is: How DEEP does this conversation really go (below the surface)? What are its subterranean truths? 

Hot tip: When you’re reading/viewing a work of art, if you’re FEELING emotion or tension that is bigger than the literal subject matter in play in the dialogue, that’s a dead giveaway that there’s another floor below. Here’s the bleeding wound, there’s the inciting trauma, here’s the resentment, there’s the father that never wanted him … etc. Chase it. Subtext is a tunneling down of pathos or love.

Let’s consider the “false floor,” using our heart-smashing FLEABAG scene…

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Example 1 (the bus):

TILE layer (what she SAYS): 

Fleabag: “This bus is not miraculously coming.” Literally, the bus is coming; then the bus suddenly is not coming.

WOODEN floor layer (what she MEANS):  

We wait for things that feel impossible … they do finally arrive and then—just as suddenly, they’re stolen away from us.

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Example 2 (love):

TILE layer:  

Fleabag: “The worst thing is … I love you. I fucking love you.”

Hot Priest: “It’ll pass.” Then: “I love you too.”

WOODEN floor layer:

Fleabag:  You’re the only man I’ve ever actually loved. It’s finally happened for me. This is everything.

Hot Priest:  I love you too, but it cannot compete with my love for my God. I must try to love you as I love all humans—which prevents me from loving you romantically.

OLD, original ragged layer:

Fleabag:  It is huge that I can say this to you. That I can talk about love, honestly at all. THAT is what I’ve needed for a long time. You helped get me here, back to myself. I want you, but okay. I’ll take myself instead. 

Hot Priest:  And you got me here. Back to myself. Back to my purpose. I love you for you, and I love you for that. Thank you.

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Try these “false floors” on! You can take dialogue you’ve written already for a previous project, and subtext diagram your own scenes this way, by simply filling in what’s happening in you conversation at each level. Am I an accredited home construction expert? Absolutely not! Do I know how the hell flooring works? No! But you get my gist.

Descending from superficial to foundational, we’ll name our subtext diagram layers like so:

1. TILE layer

2. TOP wooden layer

3. OLD, original, ragged floor

4. SUPPORTING subfloor

5. JOISTS, the foundational beams 

Sometimes it goes so deep that there’s also …

6. SOIL layer

To be clear: We don’t write dialogue to hide things! We write dialogue to capture human desire, need, strength, frailty (all of it!) in its clunky real world languaging—the way REAL humans actually talk, just amped up as needed for impact. So the goal in “acing” subtext in your dialogue writing is never to hide deeper meanings from your audience—not at all! It’s about showing humans to themselves, as themselves, in the most poignant, honest, confused way … because we humans are very fucking confused! But beautifully confused.

Excercises

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Zip up your winter coat! The BEST WAY TO LEARN HOW TO WRITE BRILLIANT DIALOGUE is to study real people, so …

1).  Urban Safari:

Your first exercise is light and fun, and probably illegal, but writers are fearless criminals who will do anything for their art, right?! I want you to go somewhere in public with the explicit purpose of eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, out in the wilds of your town/city/neighborhood. You’re just a record-taker for this one. Some ideas: cafes packed with people are fantastic. Grocery stores. Doctor’s office waiting rooms. The subway platform. Bring the recording apparatus that works best for your brain: either a notepad/pen, a ready Notes app on your phone, or if you think writing will miss stuff: capture it in real-time on the very helpful Voice Memo. It’s okay if you don’t get every single line, but try to zero in on the fumbling, inarticulate minutia and absurdities. 

When you get home, flesh out the transcript fully with what you remember.

(Rinse & repeat throughout the week, if you have time! Rich, hilarious, vulnerable conversations are all around us.)

2).  Afterward, read through and review your “found” conversation(s) for the following:

A.  Unintentional/unself-aware comedy?

B.  Did they talk AROUND anything?

C.  Who the hell ARE these people?!

D.  What do you imagine the relationship is between them?

E.  If this scene were going into a script, what genre would the film be? Horror, dry indie emo, romantic comedy, drama, suspense, sci-fi, action, thriller?

Share your findings below! (Spoiler alert - we’ll go on a creative bender with this Urban Safari starter later)

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Up Next → What lessons can we learn from shameless eavesdropping? Plenty! We’ll dissect how the human species navigates conversation in the wild, watch/read a stunner of a conversation from the film “LADY BIRD,” and bounce these lessons off fun, free-flow quick writes to get your dialogue juices flowing. 

See you next week, brainiacs!

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