Writer's Toolbox by Frances Altman
Last edited: Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Posted: Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Discusses Building dialogue
Maryland Writers Association
Winter 2017 Newsletter
Writer's Toolbox
Listening Builds Dialogue
By Frances Altman
How do your characters talk? Like real people? Of course they don’t!
When was the last time you listened to real people talking? Writing dialogue or conversations between characters and using it to move a story forward can be harder to do than most writers think. Recently two playwrights speaking to the Baltimore Chapter of Maryland Writer’s Association (MWA) told how they gather dialogue by listening to people talking in shopping malls and coffee shops. Whether you call it eavesdropping or just listening, these conversations are a good way to collect expressions, current buzzwords, accents, colloquial expressions or pronunciation—the real way people talk. Then the writer refines it!
Aaron Henkin
WYPR* producer Aaron Henkin told Maryland Writers how he has created a unique radio program entitled “Out of the Blocks” by gathering and linking conversations together. His idea is to record and then listen to people talking. The Baltimore program captures the way people talk in specific neighborhoods. “Program followers say it sparks their imagination. They wonder how the speakers look and what they might do for a living?” For example:
The 200 block of West Saratoga Street is nestled amid the bustle of downtown Baltimore. Church bells ring in a duet with the clanging Light Rail. City buses rattle and hiss while loud sidewalk conversations compete with the din. These are the sounds that reverberate through a block peppered with a Bengali body oil shop, barbershops and salons, a candle store, and the shoe-repair shop of a Russian cobbler.
These are the sounds and conversations Henkin captures. Then he begins to process these sounds just as a writer would edit. “When you listen to radio it is an intimate medium. You are completing an image in your head.” For a one-hour PBS show he tapes, listens to and cuts up to 25 hours of audio recordings. Then he puts himself in the “listening” seat and begins reducing the conversations. He listens to each segment many times reducing it again and again. His final cut is what he calls “slivers of moments.”
“From a study of a voice you can give your character a unique personality that will help the listener’s (or reader’s) imagination grow,” says Henkin. Once the dialogue is in place, the writer can enhance the scene by adding gestures such as frowning to continue moving the story forward. Use dialogue tags such as “he said” or “she replied” sparingly because they draw attention away from the conversation.
Listening is an active process. It is not just overhearing a conversation. It requires a greater effort than just hearing words. It requires a degree of discipline and energy whether you are recording it or jotting it down. Researchers tell us that an individual listens 45 percent of the time.** So, we must frequently force ourselves to quit talking, stop thinking and concentrate on listening.
Gathering character clues doesn’t mean they must be used immediately. File them away for the future. Say you hear two Italian painters conversing. Immediately your imagination clicks with an image. Save it! Just a word or phrase in Italian could add to a scene you may write next year.
Not surprising today, but many conversations are sprinkled with swearing. A writer would not need to use but one “damn” to spark the imagination, make the point and move on.
Educators tell us that listening is an acquired skill that is being neglected.** So why not make listening a talent to be added to your writer’s tool box?
*WYPR 88.1 FM Baltimore PBS
**U.S. Air Force Guidebook
Excellent article. I am working on my dialogue. Originally when I wrote, I avoided dialogue because I found it rather difficult. Even today, I find that my speakers say too much before they stop talking. I'm always trying to use the dialogue to move my story along, rather than write it the way it might be in real life with all the sidetracks, arguments, and just plain chitchat that has nothing to do with the story.
Watching television drama moving very fast to get everything done in an hour time slot, the actors fire one or two word phrases with a lot of expletives… Usually arguments about what they are going to do next.
On the other hand, while listening to telephone conversations from my partner's iPhone speakerphone in Vietnamese. I find often that the conversations are very one-sided, with one person talking for a very long time before the other gets a word in edge wise. So, people in TV dramas don't really talk like real people. And, real people often try to do monologue rather than dialogue to make their points, especially when they don't have the benefit of face-to-face conversation with nonverbal cues (except when on Skype or FaceTime).
So, I find my story conversations to be more like real life conversations, even though they are only written to drive the story forward. I find TV dramas to be highly unrealistic, action oriented and unnecessarily violent.
Watching television drama moving very fast to get everything done in an hour time slot, the actors fire one or two word phrases with a lot of expletives… Usually arguments about what they are going to do next.
On the other hand, while listening to telephone conversations from my partner's iPhone speakerphone in Vietnamese. I find often that the conversations are very one-sided, with one person talking for a very long time before the other gets a word in edge wise. So, people in TV dramas don't really talk like real people. And, real people often try to do monologue rather than dialogue to make their points, especially when they don't have the benefit of face-to-face conversation with nonverbal cues (except when on Skype or FaceTime).
So, I find my story conversations to be more like real life conversations, even though they are only written to drive the story forward. I find TV dramas to be highly unrealistic, action oriented and unnecessarily violent.
Ron