Writing good dialogue: lessons from "writer and encourager of writers," Greg Mosse
"The most important thing in dialogue is the thing that is not said"
The day after the winners of the 2022 ELF Seddiqi Fellowship were announced, our first workshop was hosted by the wonderful Greg Mosse. Greg is an incredible teacher. I’m so grateful to have had the chance to learn from him through private sessions for the ELF Seddiqi fellows (he’s also been a mentor to some lucky up-and-coming authors in the program since its inaugural year) as well as through workshops open to the public, held as part of the annual Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. I will always be eager to absorb his knowledge on various aspects of writing craft, from the fundamentals of great writing to creating suspense.
The husband of international bestselling author Kate Mosse, Greg is an accomplished author himself. He actually began his career in theatre, having worked as an actor, director, and writer, and he’s currently the founder and leader of the Criterion New Writing script development program at the Criterion Theatre, London.
At the 2023 edition of the Emirates LitFest, I took an incredible workshop that he led along with his wife, Kate, on writing good dialogue. Despite the fact that I am quite a chatterbox in real life (well, when I’m passionate about something anyway - I can also happily spend days in silence, especially when I need to recharge my personal battery, so to speak), I used to struggle with dialogue. How can we write in a way that makes your characters sound like real people? How can we use it to show, not tell? How can we incorporate subtext, or ensure that your characters actually sound like different people rather than all having the same voice (and, even worse, all only like you)?
Turns out one of those things - the subtext - is one of the most important parts of good dialogue. Greg opened the session with one simple but profound statement: “The most important thing in dialogue is the thing that is not said.” He explained, “There’s the surface, and the thing that is not said - the subtext, or le non-dit. It has to be engaging in its own right, but it also must be suggestive of something else - something that has not yet been revealed. And how is it revealed? By subsequent scenes, whether it’s dialogue or action.”
Greg explained that in good writing, essentially, everything we write is a counterpoint of successive scenes. “It modifies what the reader knows about the story, and changes their memory of the previous dialogue and what it means,” he said. And in order for us to do this well, it needs to be said, rather than told.
One sign of bad dialogue is when a character gives information in a way that someone would generally never do in real life. For instance, imagine you’re writing a scene with two brothers, wherein Brother 1 speaks to Brother 2, saying: “Hello Brother 2. You’re my brother, and we grew up together. You’ve always hated ice hockey.” In real life, only the last line would probably be said.
Avoiding this can achieved through a combination of using common sense, reading it aloud (if it sounds ridiculous, then it probably is), and asking yourself, “Why does it need to happen live and be said now, rather than be reported?” If you closed your eyes and imagined yourself in that situation, how would the conversation really go? As Greg said, “Think of dialogue as something fresh that helps the scene happen live, giving you a good balance between description vs. what is happening right now. This gives the reader a feeling that they’re eavesdropping on a conversation.” This way, Greg explained, as the dialogue reveals the different points of view, the two characters can showcase loads of different information in a way that doesn’t feel unnatural or childish, with a good amount of what a reader is able to glean being implicit.
For it to feel truly powerful or effective, in the following scene, you can ask yourself what would be a counterpoint that sheds new light on the information you’ve just learned? An example: Two siblings are having an argument about their disabled parent, and how to best care for them. The way they speak can make us think the two siblings are jerks, as they try to fob the crux of the responsibility off onto their sibling. How awful of them, when their parent has special needs, and clearly needs their help? Yet in the next scene, we could meet the parent in question - only to discover that they are actually a total jerk. This upends everything the reader might assume from the previous conversation, and leaves them, as Greg put it, “emotionally wrecked.”
When I first started writing fiction, one of the first things I did in my attempt to write better dialogue was to just listen to the way people talk. As many of them as possible, as often as possible. I’d take myself to a café, and listen to the conversations around me. Sometimes I’d make notes. I’d then visit a totally different type of environment, and listen to how the people there talked. I assured myself it wasn’t a creepy form of eavesdropping, because I was doing research.
In real life, people tend to use a lot of phrases like, “And then she said this, and he said that,” not to mention a lot of umm, ahhs, and fillers like “you know,” “I mean,” “basically,” or “like.” I’m guilty of it too. These fillers can occasionally help with developing a distinct character voice - for instance, once of my friends ends a lot of sentences with “Right?” If I were to write a character inspired by her, including this word as a part of the speech patterns that make her so uniquely identifiable would help me do away with using too many dialogue tags. It would also make the character sound more real. I wouldn’t do it too much, but it can serve a purpose. What we can generally always get rid of, however, is the: “And then she said this, and he said that.” We just don’t need it. In its space, you might want to add something in that helps to kill the “disappearing in a group” problem: If you have three characters in a scene, where only two are really talking, it can be easy to forget that the third character is there. Reminding your reader that they’re still in the room, albeit quietly, can be as simple as adding in an action that Character C does - e.g. “Claire fidgeted in her chair” - or having one of the two chatty ones ask them something like, “Have you even been listening?” so they can respond with “Yes, I have nothing to add.”
Another great tip from Greg was that the nature of the dialogue can be governed in part by the type of novel you’re writing. For a thriller, for instance, you can make the language quite sharp and hard, with very few qualifiers, since that can get in the way of the tense, hurried pace. Whereas, in cozy crime, for instance, you’re likely to find more everyday-style speech. Think about the setting or environment your characters live in, too. In a high fantasy or sci-fi setting, for example, think about how the world is constructed - how would the rules of your world-building affect the way people speak? Would people from different parts of that world speak differently? If you’re writing historical fiction, how did people speak at the time? Are there cultural aspects you could incorporate to show something about a character, like mimicking the syntax of another language? Whatever you do, however, Greg advises doing so with a considered and light hand: “A little goes a long way. Don’t overdo it, especially when showcasing different types of dialogue,” he said.
The session was 2-3 hours long and packed with helpful information, and if you ever get the chance to take a workshop with either Greg or his wife, Kate Mosse, I would highly recommend it. But first, a few more of their nuggets of wisdom:
Always read your dialogue out loud. Write it down, then read it, and strip it back, again and again, until it doesn’t sound false.
Your primary and secondary character can be given a first name and surname. An occasional supporting character can have them too. The rest, however - and all of those who are simply part of a crowd - don’t usually need one.
After you’ve introduced your most important character in a scene, you can root everyone else around them. For instance, if you’ve introduced a character called Jill, and she’s the most important in the scene, when her boyfriend Jack responds, instead of saying “Jack said,” you can simply say: “Her boyfriend said.”
Don’t forget about reported speech. If you have a section of clunky dialogue, could it be presented as reported speech instead?
Whether you’re working on dialogue or any other part of your craft, you’d be wise to remember one of Greg’s most famous pieces of advice for writing good fiction: “Your reader is more interested in what they don’t know than what they know.”
