Rebecca Entel: GET IT WRONG • Writing Tips

A Writing Tip by Rebecca Entel
Get it Wrong: Crafting Authentic Dialogue through Mistakes and Omissions

When we speak, we rarely do so well. We restart sentences, use fragments, say useless words like um. Take a look at some linguistic transcripts of real speech sometime – they’re barely comprehensible.

When characters speak perfectly, they can sound inauthentic. But often in writing dialogue, we forget about all of the mistakes and missteps. Try having your characters share only incomplete thoughts; misspeak; ramble; tell partial truths or even outright lies; struggle to say what they mean; choose silence.

What happens to your scene if your character is interrupted when speaking? Or is misheard? Putting pressure on your characters’ conversations will inevitably bring in all of the imperfections that make speech sound authentic. Try out some different settings to see how the dialogue changes:

a crowded restaurant in which the character struggles to be heard – or is conscious of being overheard;
a car ride in which the characters don’t have to face each other but also can’t leave the conversation; or put these two on a spaceship to heighten their sense of being trapped;
a full classroom in which the adult characters have to choose their words carefully;
a card game in which new people join and others leave, all mid-conversation;
a romantic conversation during which an emergency arises;
a family re-telling a shared memory to the one stranger at their holiday meal.

Or make the situation more complex:

among three people who have different first languages;
between two people who are both worried what they say could get them in big trouble;
among five people who have already had many conversations about the topic;
between two people who have a bad phone connection.

The most realistic dialogue often occurs when we stop thinking about dialogue as a tool to reveal information through its content. Instead, think about dialogue as a tool to reveal character through its form. Bonus: making our characters’ dialogue sound real – true to who they are and in response to other characters and the world – will open up new possibilities for your story.

Rebecca Entel is the author of a novel, Fingerprints of Previous Owners; stories and essays in such journals as Guernica and Literary Hub; and flash in Jellyfish Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing, U.S. and Caribbean literature, and the literature of social justice at Cornell College, where she also directs the Center for the Literary Arts. She mentors in the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing program.