Good dialogue

One of the dangers of writing dialogue is that it can be too on-the-nose.  I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the term on-the-nose, so I want to unpack it and offer some alternative ways of defining it.

Here is an example of dialogue taken from The Writer’s Digest article “7 Tools ofDialogue”:  

“Hello, Mary.”
“Hi, Sylvia.”
“My, that’s a wonderful outfit you’re wearing.”
“Outfit? You mean this old thing?”
“Old thing! It looks practically new.”
“It’s not new, but thank you for saying so.”

The article says there are no surprises here, and that is true.  But what is really happening is the characters are being completely forthright and open with each other.  Questions are answered completely and happily.  Also, the stakes of this dialogue are low to non-existent.  After all, why should we care about the wonderful outfit Mary is wearing? 

So one way to make the dialogue more interesting is to make one of the characters evasive.  They may not want to answer questions, or they may not want to do what they are asked to do.  But they want to be polite about it, so they come of with different ways to avoid answering questions fully or at all.  Or they may find a way to answer directly while shocking the interrogator so that the interrogator changes what they want. 

Another way is to make the stakes of the conversation high.  What if Mary’s dress was stolen goods, and she doesn’t want to reveal where she got it?  

Another way is to make the topic an unexpected hot-button issue for one of the characters.  What if Mary hates the dress she’s wearing, but she was forced to wear it for family photos?  What if Mary is not someone who is comfortable wearing dresses and would much rather wear pants?  How would she react to someone commenting she looks lovely? 

Another way is to give the interrogator hidden motives for asking the questions.   What if Sylvia (the girl who is complimenting Mary’s dress) knows that Mary hates wearing dresses, and she compliments Mary on her dress just so she can rub Mary’s face in the fact that Mary is wearing a dress?

Yet another way is to put the dialogue in a story context that makes it more interesting.  For instance, what if the above dialogue happened near the end of a story in which Mary's conflict was a very stormy relationship with Sylvia?  In this case, the above dialogue might be part of a payoff the story was building toward, showing that Mary has accomplished her goal of bringing them into a peaceful coexistence.  It would need more internal dialogue to heighten that effect, but it could fit fairly well.

I think you get the picture. 

I think we’ve shown here that on-the-nose dialogue needs doses of tension, evasion, emotion, and motive.  Lots of this can be done in the internal dialogue of the characters to spice it up.  We’ll imagine them circling each other (mentally), calculating how to meet their goals, measuring and rationing the information they give each other as they battle for ascendency, parsing each other’s words for hidden meeting, reeling under the hidden blows of the other’s words, regrouping and recalculating for the next round, etc.    This is words as a battle.  Conversation as conflict.