How to write dialogue that drives conflict
“Dialogue is what characters do to each other.” – Elizabeth Bowen
Are there any rules for writing fiction?
The problem with much of the writing advice you’re going to find googling around on the internet—among legitimately talented and genuinely caring writers and teachers—is that what others call the craft of fiction is just the dissection of market trends.
MFA professors running graduate fiction seminars aren’t better. Workshop critiques are never supposed to be prescriptive (never mind that every editor who buys your book will be exactly just that) and talks about the craft of writing end up in unacknowledged woo-woo about “artist instinct.” Not much gets taught about how to actually construct a story.
There are story forms that have survived for millennia. There are techniques that almost always elicit the desired emotional response from readers. No, there are no formulas and there are no rules—well, except maybe one, story is conflict.
Every character, in every story wants something and forces lurk in the outer dark to stop them from getting it. This results in conflict both loud and quiet. Run everything you’ve ever loved reading, watching, or listening to through this filter and you will uncover a universal source code of story.
Pride and Prejudice? The conflict between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy (among many) drives the story.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Slugworth and Willy Wonka, particularly in the original 1971 feature film, are locked in an eternal battle for morality in the candy business that plays out through the Golden Ticket contest.
Even SpongeBob Square Pants, that benign and holey, organ-less sea creature, in his quest to live peacefully in his beloved Bikini Bottom with his trusted Sancho Panza-like sidekick, Patrick the starfish, must battle with the misunderstood Squidward.
We don’t even need to look at the more obvious conflict driven genres like Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Action, Mystery, Thriller, etc., and for good reason: the conflict is plainly obvious.
The law of conflict is the only immutable factor of story. No conflict, no story.
But what if you don’t want a story of a person facing the elements, or God, or society? What if you don’t want fisticuffs, fire, mayhem, spaceships zipping at mach speed through narrow, crescent shaped gorges or sorcerer’s conjuring the universe’s dark arts?
How do you manufacture conflict then?
Dialogue.
What is dialogue?
Robert McKee has a very radical definition for dialogue but it’s the best I’ve ever come across: Dialogue consists of any words said by any character to anyone. Note, McKee isn’t saying dialogue is only words spoken by any character to any other character but it also consists of what characters say to themselves or to the reader.
The three forms of dialogue
First, dramatized dialogue contains a specific intention that causes a reaction within a scene. Your elementary school teacher was wrong when they said words can’t hurt you. Words can kill you. Imagine the person who you think you’re going to spend the rest of your life with, or your best friend, or your parents walk into the room you’re in right now and say “we never loved you,” and fucking mean it. Everything will change in an instant.
Use dramatized dialogue to cause change in a story.
A second type of dialogue is monologue. Monologue is most effective when deployed at the pivotal moment of a story. Pivotal moments are almost always at the height of conflict and that crest usually occurs late in the story.
It’s a stretch, and bear with me diehard Star Wars fans, but during the final attack on the Death Star at the end of A New Hope, the apparition of Obi Wan Kenobi appears to Luke and implores him to “use the Force” in order to win the battle. This is an example of monologue.
Yes, Obi Wan is a character, yes it can be argued that this is an example of dramatized dialogue, however, given that Luke Skywalker completed his training and has arrived at his final test with everything he already needs inside of him (including Obi Wan), the command to use the Force at this pivotal moment is actually Luke speaking to Luke in a monologue.
The result is Luke disabling his X-Wing Fighter’s telemetry systems and using a mystical power to make the kill shot. The self-commandment to use the Force leads to saving the universe from The Empire.
A third type of dialogue is narratized dialogue, or words spoken from outside of a scene, soliloquy, aside, or a narrator giving backstory.
As filmmakers or television creators have their cameras, poets have a peculiar felicity with words, videogame designers the deep interaction of player and the played, fiction writers own the space of narratized dialogue because fiction always has a narrating Point of View.
Narratized dialogue gives us a great advantage in plot time management. If you wanted to tell a story that played out over a character’s lifetime, how long (and boring) would that novel be if you had to start at the moment a character was born and end when they died with no breaks in between?
A story is life without all the boring parts and by employing narratized dialogue, i.e. ‘once upon a time,’ or ‘many years passed until…,’ we supply summary to explain very quickly what has occurred in the passage of time and maintain the tension driven conflict of story.
Narratized dialogue has limitations. Employed wrongly, it tells and doesn’t show.
The Said, the Unsaid, and the Unsayable
All dialogue carries us on a wave of sensation that reverberates through the said, unsaid, and unsayable.
The said is the ideas and emotions a character chooses to express to others. This is fairly obvious, especially in fiction, as it mostly consists of speech contained inside of quotations that characters’ exchange. The said is your dramatic dialogue.
The unsaid are the thoughts and feelings a character expresses in an inner voice only to themselves. The unsaid is essentially monologue. Fiction uses the unsaid to create tension.
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is illustrative of this, Raskolnikov has murdered a cheapskate pawnbroker in cold blood and the double-speak interplay of his monologue and dramatic dialogue as he attempts to escape punishment for his crime leads us to a dramatic, and explosive conclusion.
Playing the said and the unsaid off each other deepens and advances conflicts by showing characters lying to themselves, each other, or both.
The unsayable is the subconscious urges and desires a character cannot express ever to themselves because they are muted beyond awareness. This is hard to grasp but it’s crucial to build authentic tension.
Let’s go back to the source code: stories are conflict. Conflict is driven by desire. Every character wants something in every scene and these wants are driven by their inner need and outer desire.
Their inner need is what drives them, it is the emotional core of unsayable dialogue. A character’s outer desire is the expression of that inner need in what they say—or don’t—to the world.
Consider Tony Soprano, who steals and murders in order to acquire wealth and power—his outer desires—must also attend weekly and intense talk therapy sessions to understand the source of his panic attacks which seem to be linked to a fear that he will lose the family he loves because his lifestyle. As a gangster trapped in a highly ritualized culture that prizes emotional vapidity, he can only express this need for love by outwardly desiring and gaining power.
Tony Soprano’s unsayable dialogue is that he is a hurt, little boy pretending to be brave. If you’ve watched the show, you know that the tension between power and love drives it to a disastrous conclusion.
An easy tactic to fit unsayable dialogue into a story is having two characters avoid discussing the terrible truth of an absent third character in the form of dramatized dialogue.
How to write dialogue that drives conflict
Ask yourself three simple questions before you write a line of dialogue:
1) What does my character want out of this situation?
2) At this precise moment, what action would they take in an effort to reach that desire?
3) What exact words would they use to carry out that action?
Dialogue is a tool to solve the problem of the blank page. You wouldn’t use a hammer to screw in a nail and you shouldn’t write lines that waste a reader’s time. Ask the right questions, select the best form of dialogue and use the said, unsaid, and unsayable in combination to achieve authentic conflict.
Do it right and we’ll keep reading. Do it better and we might even finish. A story finished is the readers’ greatest compliment to its creator.
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