By our favorite artist Mariam Chagelishvili

This is part 1 of How Real Humans Talk — Dialogue Writing Essentials
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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 four lessons, 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:

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.
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.

Over the next four lessons, 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”

Use these lessons 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-part 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

The Dialogue Workshop

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