Writing Believable Dialogue: The Art of Character Interruptions

From Edie: Sarah Sally Hamer shares how character interruptions, unfinished thoughts, and competing goals can help writers create believable dialogue that sounds like real conversation

Writing Believable Dialogue: The Art of Character Interruptions

By Sarah Sally Hamer @SarahSallyHamer

Dialogue Isn't Tennis. It's Jazz.

I have a theory that a lot of dialogue problems begin long before the writer ever types the first line of conversation. I think they begin with the picture we carry around in our heads of what conversation actually is, because if we're being honest, most of us don't spend much time listening to people talk. We think we do. We spend our lives surrounded by conversations. We listen to our spouses, our children, our neighbors, the woman in line behind us at the grocery store who's telling her friend about some catastrophe involving a dog and a birthday cake. Conversation is everywhere. And yet, when we sit down to write it, something curious happens. We create exchanges that feel far more orderly than anything we encounter in the wild.

I've caught myself doing it more than once.

A character says a thing. Another character thoughtfully responds to that thing. Then the first character answers the response. The information moves neatly from one side of the page to the other, everyone taking turns and waiting politely for their opportunity to speak. Which sounds perfectly reasonable until you sit in a restaurant and eavesdrop on the table next to you for five minutes and realize nobody is behaving that way.

I was listening to a family recently and the conversation was nearly impossible to diagram. One person was telling a story while somebody else corrected the details. A third person had become distracted by something that happened earlier and kept returning to it. Two people started a side conversation. Someone interrupted to ask a question that seemed entirely unrelated, and somehow all of them continued moving together without appearing confused by any of it. It wasn't orderly. It wasn't efficient. It wasn't even particularly logical. But it was alive.

That's when the thought occurred to me that maybe dialogue isn't tennis after all.

Maybe it's jazz.

Not the movie version of jazz, where everyone is impossibly cool and effortlessly brilliant. I’m talking about actual musicians who are listening to each other, stepping forward, stepping back, responding to something they just heard, changing direction because another voice entered the conversation. The performance doesn't emerge because everyone waits quietly for their turn. It emerges because everybody is paying attention while simultaneously carrying their own intentions into the room.

I think that's why interruptions matter so much.

Writers are often taught the mechanics of interruption. We learn where to place the dash. We learn how to cut somebody off mid-sentence. But the punctuation isn't actually the interesting part. What interests me is that interruptions reveal pressure. They show us where a character's attention naturally goes and what they're unable to leave alone. Sometimes an interruption is excitement. Sometimes fear. Sometimes a desperate attempt to keep another person from saying the thing everybody already knows is coming. It certainly is the opportunity for a writer to let characters express whatever they need to.

When you start looking at interruptions this way, they stop feeling rude and start feeling like they’re revealing something important.

The same thing seems true of unfinished thoughts. If you listen carefully to real conversations, people abandon sentences constantly. Not because they forgot what they intended to say, but because saying the rest of it suddenly feels too difficult, too vulnerable, too unnecessary, or too dangerous. They trust the listener to fill in the gap. Or they're hoping the listener won't.

I sometimes think beginning writers put more complete thoughts into their characters' mouths than real people have ever spoken.

Because real people wander.

They circle. They revise a thought halfway through saying it. They chase three ideas at once and only finish one.

Part of what makes dialogue feel believable is allowing some of that natural incompleteness to reach the page.

And beneath all of it is the thing I find most fascinating: people in a conversation are rarely pursuing the same objective. One person might be trying to get an answer while another is trying to avoid giving one. One could want reassurance. Another may need an escape. Someone may be hoping for an apology. One wants the subject changed before the apology is even mentioned. The words we hear are only part of that exchange. Underneath is this tangle of competing desires pulling the conversation in different directions.

Maybe that's why believable dialogue has rhythm rather than structure.

Rhythm allows people to step on each other's lines a little. Rhythm allows a thought to trail away unfinished. Rhythm allows a conversation to drift somewhere unexpected before finding its way back home.

And, ultimately, it sounds like real people instead of a textbook.

The next time your dialogue feels stiff, I wouldn't immediately look at the wording. I'd spend a few minutes listening instead. Listen to families. Listen to old friends. Listen to coworkers trying to solve a problem. Then come back to the page and ask whether your characters are truly talking to one another, or whether they're still standing on opposite sides of a net waiting patiently for the ball to return.

For ways to write believable dialogue, click here for a free video, The Art of Letting Characters Interrupt Each Other.

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Sarah (Sally) Hamer is a lover of books, a teacher of writers, and a believer in a good story. Most of all, she is eternally fascinated by people and how they 'tick'. She’s passionate about helping people tell their own stories, whether through fiction or through memoir. Writing in many genres - mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance, medieval history, non-fiction—she has won awards at both local and national levels, including two RWA Golden Heart finals.

A teacher of memoir, beginning and advanced creative fiction writing, and screenwriting at Louisiana State University in Shreveport for over twenty years, she also teaches online at both MARGIELAWSON.COM and NOSTRESSWRITING.COM and blogs for WRITERSINTHESTORMBLOG.COM/ as well as her monthly blog for The Write Conversation. Sally is a free-lance editor and book coach at Mind Potential, with many of her students and clients becoming successful, award-winning authors. 

You can find her at sally@mindpotential.org