Jazz Up Your Dialogue With These Five Weird Tricks

We owe today’s missive to Stefania, who commented on one of my recent posts, requesting a post about how to write good dialogue.

Dialogue doesn’t crop up as often you’d expect in the Craft Advice corner of Substack. Maybe that’s because writers are supposed to just “have an ear for dialogue,” and if they don’t, well, time to find another calling in life.

But I think dialogue can be taught, just as any craft element can be taught. So what follows below is my advice on how to make your dialogue more interesting, more dynamic, and more revealing of character.

Fair warning: I got pretty in the weeds with this post, and there are a lot of off-the-cuff examples and absurdly close readings and a faintly neurotic section on punctuation. If you don’t write fiction, and you subscribe to this Substack simply because you like my vibe, this might be one to skip.

Onward!

In real life, we often employ single-layer dialogue. I ask you “What time is it?” because I want to know what time it is. You tell me, “It’s ten o’clock.” Great. We have successfully concluded that interaction.

But you can imagine a scenario in which the same question might have two layers. I’m asking you “What time is it?” because we’re late for a brunch date with a couple we dislike, and you’re still sitting there peaceably drinking coffee. My innocent question about the time is a not-so-subtle way to nudge you into action. Come on, let’s mobilize, let’s get to brunch.

You might then glance up from your coffee to the clock on the wall, which is plainly in my line of sight as well as yours. “Ten o’clock,” you answer coolly. You know we’re running late—you just don’t care. It’s my fault we agreed to this brunch date anyway. If I care so much about arriving on time, I should come out and say so, instead of slyly asking what time it is.

This is two-layer dialogue1: dialogue in which both characters have more than one agenda.

You can see the difference these layers make if we expand the scene a little. First, here’s the single-layer interaction, carried out to its logical conclusion:

“What time is it?”

“Ten o’clock. Shoot, weren’t we supposed to meet John and Miriam at 10:30?”

“Yes, and it’ll take at least twenty minutes to drive there—and then of course we’ll have to find parking…”

“I’m glad you reminded me! I’ll be ready in two minutes.”

There’s no hidden agenda here, no ripple of subtext under the text. The characters are united in one wish: to arrive at their brunch date on time.

But see what happens when we add back those hidden agendas:

“What time is it?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Ten o’clock already… I didn’t realize it was so late!”

“Is that a problem?”

“Well, only that we were supposed to meet John and Miriam at 10:30 downtown…”

“It’s a twenty-minute drive.”

“Twenty-five, and we’ll have to find parking—”

“Of course, you’re right. It’s an emergency. What am I doing drinking coffee? My god, to think we were nearly two minutes late for brunch with John and Miriam!”

This scene communicates the same information, and also communicates a fraught relationship dynamic, setting us up for a tense brunch with poor John and Miriam.

Adding extra layers to your dialogue is almost always a good idea. I can’t think of a time I’ve read an exchange of dialogue and thought, “I wish this had fewer layers!” Layered dialogue gets more done in the same space, and tells the reader much more about each character: not just what the character wants, but what they’re choosing to say in order to get what they want.

One surefire way to add layers to your dialogue is to work out the three S’s for each of your characters.

Haven’t heard of the three S’s? That’s because I made them up! Each character in your scene can have up to three motives going into a given conversation:

1. stated

2. secret

3. subconscious

In the scene above, the character who asks “What time is it?” has a stated motive: she wants to know what time it is. But her secret motive is to nudge her partner to mobilize for brunch. And her subconscious motive? Well, she’s dreading this brunch as much as her partner is, but she does feel obligated to show up on time and make the best of it. She’s angry with herself for agreeing to the brunch in the first place, so she’s stressed and frustrated and guilty, and it’s driving her crazy that while she’s swept up in this emotional maelstrom, her partner is calmly sipping his coffee, like none of this is his problem. So her subconscious motive is to disturb his pleasant morning—to punish him for attempting to absolve himself of this responsibility. They’re a couple, damn it. They’re supposed to confront unpleasant things together! Why is he acting like this is her problem alone?

You get the idea.

Now, a caveat: you don’t have to do this for every single instance of dialogue in your story, nor for every character. The waiter at the restaurant doesn’t need to have a subconscious motive when she delivers the pancakes. But if a scene is feeling flat, or an exchange is feeling purely informational, see if you can juice it up with some layered character agendas.

The more you do this, the more interesting your characters will become, and the better you’ll get to know their hidden depths. Are your characters choosing their words carefully, or are they rambling unselfconsciously? What are they talking around, and what are they working their way up to? What impression do they think they’re giving off—and how far off the mark are they?

Sometimes, when I’m drafting a story, and I’m at that stage where ideas are flowing faster than I can write, I scribble down just the dialogue as I make my way through the scene. Then afterwards, I go back through and add the little rhythmic beats that dialogue requires: dialogue tags, bits of description, changes in the characters’ expression or posture, context on their surroundings.

This is just a quirk of how I write—that I hear the dialogue first, and then later make out the physical contours of a scene—but I think it’s also good practice. What would your dialogue convey if you only had dialogue to work with?

Consider the following exchange:

“Did you meet his new girlfriend?”

“I did.”

“And what did you think of her?”

“Well, I mean, she’s obviously very sweet, and he adores her. So—yeah! I liked her.”

I’d bet that as you read that exchange, you heard the tone of the speakers in your mind, their shifts in pitch and emphasis. Nothing too complicated going on with the tone here—the first speaker seems neutral, and the second speaker seems neutral trending towards positive. (“So—yeah! I liked her.”)

What if we shift the punctuation?

“Did you meet his new girlfriend?”

“I did…”

“And? What did you think of her?”

“Well—I mean, she’s obviously very sweet. And he adores her. So. Yeah. I liked her.”

The tone of the speakers has shifted too. There’s something expectant now in the tone of the first speaker (“And? What did you think of her?”)—maybe they anticipate a negative report. And the second speaker seems pretty unconvinced by the girlfriend’s charms. That list of her positive qualities is phrased hesitantly, as if each bit of praise is a concession: “Well—I mean, she’s obviously very sweet. And he adores her.” The official verdict on the girlfriend is the same—“I liked her”—but in this second example, it feels resigned and begrudging: “So. Yeah. I liked her.”

Have I convinced you that subtle shifts in punctuation can direct your reader to imagine different tones for your dialogue? Let me give a few more quick examples.

Consider:

“You know what would be great for me is if you could just calm the fuck down and let me focus.”

/versus/

“You know, what would be great for me is if you could just—calm the fuck down, and let me focus.”

“I’m telling you, it isn’t true!”

/versus/

“I’m telling you: it isn’t true.”

“I haven’t read your book yet, but I will get to it soon.”

/versus/

“I haven’t read your book yet! —but I will get to it soon!”

Now, of course, punctuation is not the only tool at your disposal to indicate the tone of dialogue. It’s not even the most powerful. The words that constitute your dialogue, and the words that surround your dialogue, are both hugely important.

“I’m telling you, it isn’t true!” Grimy tears streaked down her face.

/versus/

“I’m telling you, it isn’t true!” She nibbled the end of her bagel.

Juxtaposition of dialogue and description; alternation between dialogue and summary; filtering of dialogue through another character’s report: there are so many ways to subtly inflect the way the reader interprets your characters’ speech. I’ve focused on punctuation because I think it’s underrated and often overlooked. You might not be able to control what your readers see when you write, “It was a large church.” But you can control what they hear when you write, “I’m telling you: It. Isn’t. True.”

Not every line has to be (or should be) a masterpiece of subtle punctuation cues. But when your dialogue is feeling flat, or predictable, or hard to interpret (was that sarcastic or genuine?), try making some small, clever changes to the punctuation and see what results.

Think back to the last horribly painful argument you got into with a friend or partner or relative. The argument probably went on for ages, and at the one-hour mark, your friend/partner/relative said something absolutely devastating, something that cut to the core of your insecurities. Forty-five minutes later, you came out with a real below-the-belt zinger that unmasked their hypocrisy and double standards. Then the argument lasted another sixteen minutes, and ended with both of you stomping out of the room.

If you were to copy down the transcript of this argument, it would make for dull reading material. Real arguments are circular, guttering, repetitive, and inconclusive. The only really important things that got said in your two-hour argument with your friend/partner/relative were those peaks, at 1:00 and 1:45, when you both said something really devastating.

Luckily, in fiction, we don’t have to include all those dodges and feints leading up to the important things. We can cut straight to the good stuff:

“You know the real reason you plagiarized that manuscript? It’s not because you’re lazy, or deceitful, or impulsive. It’s because you know, deep down, that you don’t have it in you.”

“Oh, come off it. The only reason you’re so up in arms about the manuscript is because you wish you’d thought to steal it first.”

The deepest wounds, the harshest truths, the most shocking confessions—fiction takes those high points and smashes them together in one brief and high-intensity scene.

When I’m writing a dialogue-heavy scene, I often do a lot of deleting. I write six back-and-forths, reach a really interesting point in the conversation, and then realize: I should have started there. So I delete everything but the interesting part, and then I write another six back-and-forths, and then I reach the next interesting thing… and then I cut out all the filler stuff in between.

Here’s how that looks in practice:

“Hey, how’s it going?”

“I’m good. How are you?”

“Are you actually good? You look kind of—”

“Kind of…?”

“You look tired. Have you been working late this week?”

“Oh, it’s not work stuff. Actually, work is the only thing that’s going well right now. Sometimes I get to the office and I set my bag down and I look through my two hundred unread emails and I feel so relieved. Like, all right, time to go numb for the next eight hours.”

We got somewhere semi-interesting, but it took a while. So maybe we condense to this:

“Hey—are you all right? You look exhausted. Is it work again?”

“No, actually, work is the only thing that’s going well right now. I swear, sometimes I sit down to my two hundred unread emails and I just feel relieved. Like: all right, time to go numb for the next eight hours.”

If you’re diligent about condensing your dialogue to only that which is interesting or important, your dialogue will never suffer pacing problems. Your characters will keep evolving at a good clip, having opinions and epiphanies and confrontations—then it’s just up to your plot to keep up with them.

Earlier, we talked about giving each character their own agenda. However, there is one agenda you should never bestow on any of your characters: the agenda of informing the reader.

You may want to inform the reader of various matters of backstory, world-building, and context. But your characters do not want to do this. They are not aware of the reader.2 They are carrying out their conversations in hopes of achieving their own in-universe aims, and they do not care whether anyone eavesdropping can follow along.

It is always obvious when a writer is overriding their characters’ actual, plausible speech in order to fit in their own additions and contrivances. This mistake comes in many guises—here are three:

Ventriloquism: the writer uses the characters as a mouthpiece to express their own political/societal opinions

“How’s your latte?”

“It’s dreadful. I wish I hadn’t tipped so much. You know, I was reading an article the other day about the rise of tipping in coffee shops and other counter-service establishments. Customers feel the pressure to tip, and that allows employers to pay their baristas incredibly low wages. It’s just another example of the modern economy shifting responsibility onto the consumer. What we should do is just pay baristas and other service workers a fair wage, and abolish tipping altogether.”

Info-dumping: the writer stuffs exposition into the dialogue instead of the narration

“Wow, what a great picture of the four of you! Could you tell me about your parents?”

“Well, my mother is retired now, but she was an elementary school teacher for many years. She’s 76. You wouldn’t know it to meet her, but she has a bit of a wild past. When she was a teenager, she spent six months aboard a pirate ship! My father is an accountant—he’s 73. They have a very loving relationship, though sometimes I wonder whether my mom wishes she were back on that pirate ship, her hair blowing in the breeze.”

Maid-and-butler dialogue: the characters discuss things they already know for the reader’s edification

“Is it true that the mages wear flowing black robes, and speak only in tongues?”

“Yes, and what’s more, they cast terrible enchantments with their bare hands. They don’t even use wands or magical artifacts.”

“I’ve heard that too! Of course, we must never defy them openly—you know that as well as I do. But I’ve always wondered if there might be some way to rebel in secret…”

“You know better than to speak of such things! As you ought to remember, the mages are always listening…”

The impulse to cram exposition into dialogue is natural. The thinking is: if the exposition is boring in the narration, maybe it’ll be less boring in dialogue? But your reader will lose trust in your characters if they keep offering up useful tidbits of exposition without any story-driven reason to do so.

Happily, there are plenty of story-driven reasons for characters to explain their world. One common solution is to insert a newcomer into your story. They will forever be asking, “How does this work? What is that? Where does that come from?”, so that your well-informed characters can educate the newcomer and the reader in one fell swoop. Another option is to give your characters conflicting views of how their world works. Through their disagreements, the reader will hear the necessary exposition and world-building twice over, with the added fun of having to sort out which version is true.

On the whole, though, what I would advise is just not to burden your dialogue with the task of exposition. Your dialogue is already supplying characterization, providing a counterpoint to the narration, and moving the plot forward. It has enough to do!

Fictional characters can be so literal. So focused. They’ll have conversations like this:

“Can I talk to you about something?”

“Of course, honey. What’s wrong?”

“Well, I was supposed to go to that sleepover this weekend, right? But when I saw Kathleen at school, she told me I was uninvited.”

“Uninvited! Oh no. Did she say why?”

“She says I’m not cool enough.”

“That’s terrible. Should I have a word with her mother?”

“No, Mom, thanks anyway. I just wanted to tell you about it.”

Each character is responding logically to the other. The conversation moves with a predictable flow.

In real life, how does that conversation play out?

“Can I talk to you about something?”

“Of course, honey. Sorry—loud noise coming—I’ve got to blend the soup. Okay. You said you had something you wanted to tell me?”

“Well—you know how I was supposed to go to that sleepover this weekend? At Kathleen’s house?”

“Oh, shoot, was that Friday night? I’m not going to be able to drive you. Honey—I’m sorry. We can ask your father, but he often works late on Fridays… Well. I’ll see what I can do.”

“No, Mom, it’s—the thing is that I saw Kathleen at school—”

“Or perhaps you could carpool with one of the other girls? How many girls will be at this sleepover anyway?”

“I don’t know. Six? But it doesn’t matter because I won’t be going.”

“Of course it matters. We’ll find a way. Let me give your father a call now.”

“No—there’s no point. I was uninvited.”

“What do you mean you’re not going? Then why are we asking your father to give you a ride?”

Thus far in this post, I’ve pointed out ways that dialogue should break with the rules of real life. But this is a case where I advocate for a little more realism in dialogue. All the ways people talk past each other, latch onto unimportant details, jump back suddenly to a previous point, ask the wrong questions, interrupt—just a dash of that energy can spice up dialogue considerably. Your characters don’t always have to pay each other perfect attention, or answer each question they’re asked to the letter.

Dialogue with a little mess in it feels fast-paced and unpredictable, and tends to reveal more about the characters. If your character is asked three questions at once, which one do they answer first? Do they respond to the text or the subtext of the question? Is there a question among the three that they conveniently forget to answer?

A couple simple techniques to play around with:

Cross-talk: the characters each maintain half of a conversation, but they don’t seem to be having the same conversation

“God, I am just exhausted today.”

“Did you see that? Just now, out the window.”

“I feel like my brain is trying to crawl down into some secluded corner of my body.”

“With wings. Or I thought it had wings. It seemed too big to be a bird.”

“I just want to melt into nothingness and sleep.”

“Would you shut up about how tired you are and look? Where I’m pointing. There. In the grass. Don’t those look like footprints?”

Lateral leaps: characters move from thought to thought without obvious scaffolding or links between them

“God, I love the desert. Not those few weeks when everything blooms—then it just looks crowded. I like the emptiness. I’m tired of owning things. You remember that Christmas when we walked up to the edge of the pond and you tried to balance on the ice? I’ve been thinking about the look on your face when it cracked. That’s been stuck in my head, along with Beethoven’s third symphony. Just circling around: your face and that symphony. It’s hard to find anywhere anymore that feels quiet. Of course I haven’t celebrated Christmas in years.”

As you can see, it’s easy to overdo it with these techniques. The occasional dribble of wayward conversation in your dialogue will go a long way.

I think the above tips are useful ones to integrate into your approach to dialogue. But at the end of the day, the thing that usually hampers dialogue is story. If your characters are always talking about boring things, or your scenes keep getting stuck, or your characters aren’t saying the things you want them to say, you probably have a bigger structural problem—and no amount of clever punctuation tweaks will get you out of it.

If you enjoyed the random snatches of dialogue in this post—if you felt yourself subtly but inexorably manipulated by my unconventional punctuation choices—then you might enjoy my novel, which is chock-full of dialogue. Characters talk to each other in coffee shops. They talk to each other in bars. They talk to each other on the porch. They talk to each other over the phone. They talk to each other while waiting in line at the farmer’s market. I mean, they basically don’t shut up for 300 pages.

The novel is available for pre-order at Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org and probably some other places, and it would absolutely make my day if you ordered yourself a copy. If I get enough pre-orders I’ll stop waving the pre-order link around in these newsletters, and that will be better for everyone involved.

Thanks for reading! I am always open to requests, so if you have questions about writing and publishing that you think I might be able to answer, send them my way.