How to Eavesdrop

Practical Exercises for Writing Better Dialogue

Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you will know how to use a three-step exercise to (1) study dialogue and (2) write more effective dialogue in your own stories.

In 2021, I overheard a conversation that taught me everything I needed to know about writing dialogue. It was early November. I was moving back to South Korea, and my partner’s father—who had just retired from a travel-intensive job—gifted me a business class upgrade for my twelve-hour flight to Incheon. After boarding, the man in the seat in front of me was loudly yapping on the phone and posturing his importance to everyone in the cabin. Annoyed, I started to put on my headphones, but then he said, “Just do it now. The sooner you do it, the sooner the statute of limitations kicks in.”

Y’all. I was the eyes emoji incarnate. I dropped my headphones, sat at attention, and listened hard to get answers:

1. Who is this person?

2. Who is he talking to?

3. What do each of them want from each other?

4. What’s stopping the person on the phone from doing this obviously illegal thing?

5. What happens if they fail to do it—or worse—get caught before the statute of limitations kicks in?

Given where this man was sitting, I never saw his face, but I was fully seated and invested in his conversation. When teaching the craft of fiction, a common question I get is, “How do I write natural dialogue?” In attempts to write “natural dialogue” many early career writers create in-scene conversations that mirror the messy qualities of real-life exchanges. In these conversations, the characters use filler words like “uh” and “um.” They interrupt themselves and each other, and they ramble through tangents before making a point. While these qualities do make dialogue replicate real-life conversation, the hard truth is that real-life conversations are often boring to anyone who is not actively participating in the discussion.

When it comes to storytelling, our audience—whether they’re watchers or readers—are essentially eavesdropping on our protagonists’ conversations. Think about the last conversation between strangers that you listened in on. Chances are you listened in for the same reason why I listened in on that guy on the plane—you wanted answers to these questions: Who are these people? What do they want? And what happens if they fail to get what they want? Our goal as writers is to create the same sidecar experience for our readers. We create this experience in dialogue by making the stakes of the conversation clear and concrete. In our craft lesson on tension, we identified three key components for conflict:

1. A concrete goal to win, stop, escape, or retrieve

2. An obstacle in front of that goal

3. A consequence for failing said goal

That last component—the consequence—creates stakes, and stakes create reader investment. In just seventeen words, that man on the plane had me—a random third party—invested in his phone call because I wanted to know both what happens if this person commits this crime and what happens if they fail. Without stakes and reader investment, the content of dialogue doesn’t really matter. You could be the funniest, wittiest, most clever writer to have walked this earth, but if the conversation in your scene lacks these three components, your reader has no reason to “listen in” and the conversation you write is just noise, no different than the chatter of conversations in a crowded cafeteria.

Today, we’re talking about ways to raise stakes in dialogue. In April, our craft lessons delved into concrete strategies for developing our prose styles and learning how to read like a writer. In these lessons, we discussed why we have to notice what we notice about line-to-line writing in order to make informed decisions while working on our own stories. Today’s lesson breaks down how to do the same thing with dialogue. This lesson covers two writing exercises—one for creating stakes in dialogue and one for noticing what you notice about effective dialogue in books, movies, and more.

As always, you know what to do: take anything that’s useful to you and your writing life and leave everything that’s not behind.

How to Create Stakes in Dialogue