What It Means to Write Realistic Dialogue

Samsun Knight

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.

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plainsmann

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?

plainsmann

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

Robin Mizell

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.

Pimion

Knight says right things. It’s pretty hard to write a realistic dialogue and make everything natural.