It is for all these reasons, and more, that dialogue is difficult to write. As writers, we are handicapped by our own minds, the only minds that we have full knowledge of... while for the most part we are struggling to represent minds that are not us, do not represent what we believe, and want things that we would never want. It is a mystery that we're able to do this at all.
Each of us, when we speak, has an agenda to which we've committed ourselves. We want to say those things that are important to us in the moment. We say them because we want others to hear. Their hearing is crucially important; we don't just want to speak, we want to be heard — and we surround ourselves, naturally, with those people who, over the course of time, we trust to hear us when we speak. This is the first rule of any character that speaks in any medium; it is not that they wish to speak for the sake of expressing themselves, but that they wish to be heard and validated as people.
When we are not heard; when we are dismissed or discounted by another — this is the beginning of conflict. When we are heard and granted consideration for our thoughts; when others seek to lift our thoughts and embellish upon them, this is when we feel emboldened, enriched and refined. We hate the former people, who ignore us. We fall in love with the latter.
Thus we have the whole sweep of interaction between participants in a dialogue. We know others who attack our speech; those who bicker with it; those who are indifferent and those who pay it lip service. We have those who consider our words, who are affected by them, who become excited when we speak and who stop, stunned, as their present is changed by something we've just said. In the nuance of this scale, we place every reaction to every word that's spoken in our presentation... with so many possibilities that it seems, nearly always, that we drown in how we're supposed to slice these hairs with our writing knife fine enough to make it sound like proper dialogue.
I cannot teach, here, in a single article, how to write dialogue. No one can. We are plagued with advice to make dialogue 'believable" or "realistic" or true to the "character's voice" — prescriptions that do nothing in providing us with aid, like someone asking for cream in their coffee by saying, "not a lot, not a little, just enough" and so on. We need an approach that enables us to ask the explainer to "say when" as we slowly pour the cream out, so we can judge exactness in our efforts. But that is not forthcoming, and won't be, largely because writing dialogue is a matter of feel, not precision.
Let's come around again to that first point: we want to be heard. Imagine our first character not in terms of a list of personality traits, but simply in this: if you were the character, what would you want to say. What would you want the others to hear. In this case, I'm not asking that we imagine ourselves to be the character, but rather, to start from a place where we, the person we are, is the character in our story. Before we can guess what others might say for themselves, we must know what we would say.
We have to understand our own voice. This is key. We can do nothing for the rest of the world until we say what matters to us, that we want the reader or the audience. It is our work; we have undertaken it. That must be, because whatever we write, we feel others should consider it. If we can't precisely define what that thing to be heard is, then we're wasting our time trying to write other people we understand necessarily less than we do ourselves.
Writing in a diary helps us find this voice. We write, for ourselves, with the confidence that we, at least, will hear ourselves, by starting with "I think" or "This happened to me." Spending hour after hour, fifty hours, a hundred, more... we become fully aware of this voice inside us, far more than ordinary people do. Far more than we used to before beginning. It is like learning to use a tool. We start using it badly... but with time and practice, the tool becomes more comfortable in our hands, as we learn steadily what we can do with it. And inevitably, what a surprising precision the tool possesses, that we never imagined once upon a time.
There is something quintessentially missed in the diary process however, which nevertheless becomes apparent. We're writing, but we're not listening. Our characters, as depicted in a dialogue, must do more than speak... they must listen. When Jack speaks to Joan and wants to be heard, this is only possible if Joan listens; and when Joan answers, anything of value she might have to say to Jack relies upon Jack listening. So it isn't enough to practice writing. We must practice listening, too. No matter what it is that others say, we must learn to guess more profoundly in seeking out that hidden little nugget of what thing it is they want us to hear.
Therefore, when the diary is closed, the writer must wrest self from chair and seek to converse. Cast off the shyness and doubt about what we might say and seek out conversations with others, whose motives are to explain to us what they think, Seek out dialogue structures through presenting obstacles for others to knock down with their words, their thoughts, their doubts. This is not to say we should lie to others, or play mind games, but rather to be less concerned just now with what we might want to hear and more interested in what they want to say... and thus, to plough the earth before them so that they might spread their seeds of wisdom. Learn to listen. Not only to the words, but to the cadence, the momentary hesitation, the doubts they have in trusting us, the strange roundabout ways they have of getting to the point — without our needing to hurry them or force them along a path comfortable for us. This is how we acquire other voices in our head, that belong to others, that we might express them when the time comes to write our story.
And if we should find that we're not trusted at once, all the better. We will want to write two characters that don't trust each other at once. We'll want to investigate and define for ourselves that moment when someone shifts from hesitancy and feeling us out, to finding our attentions worthy of that person. We are unravelling, more than most, that point we made at the front of this: skill in guessing the thoughts of someone, through the words and sounds they project, through the physical cues of their body, through the amount of time that we've spent sitting across from them, getting to know them, finding out about their lives and sacrificing our immediate needs and desires in order to be educated by theirs.
But beware: there is peril here. Just as too much familiarity with the application of paint can destroy beauty; just as too much knowledge of how a chord contributes to music can disenchant music... knowing too well what people think and feel, and how to record that imaginatively against their will into a story they never wished to take part in, can destroy one's faith in human nature.
Seeing all the layers of people laid bare, having dissected every nuance, peeled back every intention, just so that we might better fashion dialogue — at what price, Faust, at what price. What would we surrender to have knowledge and power over what others want to hear and say, such that we can wield it like a wand to heal or a dagger to cut? Those who know little of language realise how dangerous it can be, or how intensely affecting our words spoken in just such an order can set a house to crying or a house to violence. Is this what we want? To be old and grey and bereft of company because through our efforts to write, we discovered to our unhappiness what petty, unfulfilled human beings really are? Is it worth it?
Writing is an act best performed alone. One reason we become acquainted with this loneliness descends from the time we've spent with others... and no longer want to spend. It is not music; writing does not have an audience. We will never in truth hear applause at the moment when we've completed our performance... instead, it comes months, even years after, and nearly always from those we know do not understand what we've written. This is not a lament. It is recognition that we do not seek to know others so that we will like them the better. We seek to know because we want to represent them better, as fictional beings that we control like a god. There is nothing empathic in this... and we should not pretend there is.
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