Want great writing advice? Ask a playwright
I am surprised to learn that a friend in the Iowa Writers Workshop dreads writing dialogue: “It’s the hardest part,” she tells me about working on her novel. “I feel like everyone thinks that.” In the Playwrights Workshop, where the writing often consists almost entirely of dialogue, my take is a little different. Dialogue is the bread and butter of the play. As a writing coach with Gilliam Writers Group, I’m one of several writing coaches with a background in dramatic writing. So if you need some tips on dialogue for your own novel or short story, here are a few from the theater world, where no one stops talking.
The British playwright Caryl Churchill writes sharp and propulsive scenes in which simple conversation reflects a political landscape. In her 2006 play Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, a couple argues in their living room as the couch beneath them begins to levitate. (Context: Guy is a man, and Sam is the USA, the country with whom Guy has fallen in love.)
SAM and Saddam’s let us down, he’s no longer a good guy so
GUY because sometimes propaganda isn’t enough to
SAM military solution
GUY so much fun in my life
SAM being powerful and being on the side of good is
GUY God must have so much fun
SAM win win win
GUY love you more than I can
In this disjointed, poetic style, one can appreciate the tension present between two people grasping for the right words in the haze of infatuation. Another master of dialogue who knows how to let her characters get it wrong is Annie Baker, whose play The Flick won her the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2014. In an interview with Adam Greenfield, the artistic director of the Off-Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons, she had this to offer:
The way human beings speak is so heartbreaking to me—we never sound the way we want to sound. We’re always stopping ourselves in mid–sentence because we’re so terrified of saying the wrong thing. Speaking is a kind of misery. And I guess I comfort myself by finding the rhythms and accidental poetry in everyone’s inadequate attempts to articulate their thoughts. We’re all sort of quietly suffering as we go about our days, trying and failing to communicate to other people what we want and what we believe.
When working on dialogue, don’t let your inner perfectionist erase anything prematurely. Be like a playwright, and revel in the hesitations and miscommunications of everyday speech. At Gilliam Writers Group, you will find writing coaches versed in the art of dialogue, who are eager to help you track your own accidental poetry. And say the hardest part.
