One of the biggest challenges I face as a writer in English (my mother tongue is Bangla) is incorporating direct speech into my fiction and nonfiction work. It seems like a stone fort wall that I haven’t enough ammunition or tenacity to aim a cannonball at. I fail repeatedly. I should, as per recurring advice, accept it as another truth of life, and concede defeat. Instead, I keep trying.
Now keeping on with trying, I’ve identified the problem. Well, there are actually three! Any speech or dialogue I use lacks colloquiality. That’s number one. Sometimes, when I’m in dire need of inserting a phrase in English that would work on the reader’s subconscious level — a mere hint — it fails me. Thus, my dialogues are shorn of any hint of sublimity — that’s problem two. Third, and it happens often, they are bereft of spontaneity. Alas!
I compensate for these shortcomings in my dialogue with freshness in vocabulary, precision of language, and brevity. All these are acquired skills that resulted from years of reading, listening and practice. Nonetheless, it makes sense to broaden the horizon and look for simpler tricks to chase in adding some level of expertise in writing dialogues for those of us for whom English is a foreign tongue.
Let’s start by saying dialogue is both communication and conversation and also a way of relating in which participants may say or hear something they never said or heard before, and therefore carries the story’s arc forward. It emphasizes listening, learning, and the development of shared understandings, where the reader is a mute but attentive participant.
Assuming the reader to be at a basic, working-level knowledge of language, vocabulary and comprehension, is key. I have realized that keeping sentences short and simple, instead of heavy, convoluted ones, while pushing the sequence through inquiry and conversation, helps to engage the reader’s interest. Characters may try to integrate multiple perspectives, share more than one meaning, or be dishonest, but the writing needs to be accountable to the reader in uncovering and examining their assumptions and judgments.
Secondly, context. I’m sure you’ve laughed over how funny your dialogue is on the page if pulled out of context. Dialogues are factors and results of contexts, and it’s not necessary to reaffirm the situation and explain it to the reader through dialogue. Instead, start a dialogue where the context has been established.
Let me also remind you how we speak in our real lives. Two or more people in a gathering, or a given situation, perhaps coming from different backgrounds, by nature will be drawn to dialogue. They’ll bring with them the baggage of having different basic assumptions and values. These clashing views and perspectives are strange, but they exchange conversations nevertheless. Through this process, they are enriched and that’s how it is in real-life. Dialogues must reflect that same set of complex mechanisms. It should be a device, and means, that is inviting and informative towards a meaningful discourse.
Writers may have noticed that in reading passages exhibiting lines of prolonged dialogue where people are in conversations with others, they speak differently about the issue they’re discussing. I think that is an ideal approach to let the speeches flow organically, and be as different from the next character as possible. In the real world too, do we not have our favourite phrases? Our repeated hyperboles? Or, punch lines? I believe these lend authenticity.
Therefore, dialogues, we may easily presume, weave a subtle layer of subsurface meaning that comes from society and are rooted in culture, race, religion, and economic background. That is how society works, and unearths what is most valuable.
Let’s see a negative aspect of this. If you’re new, and writing from a non-native background, there’s a common pitfall about writing conversations between characters: that is of taking a positional approach rather than a personal one. For example, communicators may get into popular euphemisms, old arguments, attacks, victimhood, defensiveness, and even rhetorical phrases. This is best avoided unless the work demands it. To my understanding, the personal approach works well in a story structure. In incorporating the character’s fallacies, complete with human idiosyncrasies, empathy, fear, surprise, and compelling opinion, we draw the attention of readers and bind them in our stories. We must offer the reader a line to connect to each other as unique human beings.
Third and finally, it meets me as a signpost that in all writing, dialogues should appear as immediate and spontaneous because your characters have met here and now. Not in the future, not in the past. They are reasoning, reflecting and pushing the story arc bit by bit. It must appear unscripted, unrehearsed and embedded in the point of time in the story. Most non-native writers, myself included, falter at this hurdle. The way out could be listening, like an attentive student in class, to real-life conversations. Reading aloud passages from great published works is helpful too.
In conclusion, dialogue is a complex, collaborative process, but not incomprehensible or unlearnable. It exists to explain and simplify the situation both in literary works and real life, and should remain as such. With enough earnest effort, one day, that fort will also fall.
Mandira Pattnaik is an Indian writer, poet and columnist. Her work appears in IHLR, The Rumpus, The McNeese Review, Quarterly West, Quarter After Eight, Best Microfiction Anthology (2024) and BSF (2021 & 2024), among others. Mandira is the author of seven collections including “Anatomy of a Storm-Weathered Quaint Townspeople” (2022), “Girls Who Don’t Cry” (2023), and “Where We Set Our Easel” (2023). She serves on the masthead of trampset and Vestal Review. Visit her at mandirapattnaik.com