If you’re a fiction writer of any kind and you’ve never studied the five levels of communication, you’re missing out on a key concept that could improve your dialogue sequences. Whenever you see a book’s dialogue described as “awkward” or “stilted,” that might be because the author doesn’t understand the basic qualities of their characters’ voices – speech pattern, tone, dialect, etc. But assuming you are an author who does understand that stuff relatively well (ie., you know how to make your characters sound different from one another without the egregious use of dialogue tags), I think it’s important to gain a deeper understanding of how real-life conversations work.
A good conversation, like a compelling story, a well-designed game, or great sex, has an “intensity curve” – a progression of force that grows from beginning to end. Human beings have a natural inclination to enjoy these sorts of experiences – those which increase in difficulty, excitement, and/or engagement as they move forward. So it follows that if you were to pick a random stranger on the street and begin to tell them about your deep-seated resentment toward your Great Aunt Hilda for not giving you enough chocolate chip cookies when you were a child, their first reaction is most likely going to be, “Where is this coming from?”
A more natural-feeling conversation might begin with you asking said stranger the time, or commenting on the weather. Hey, that would feel more natural, wouldn’t it? That’s because you’d be hitting the highest level of communication – starting at the top, with Small Talk. I think small talk is pretty self-explanatory, so let’s move on.
Facts are either things everyone knows, spoken for the purpose of building rapport, or they’re new information, delivered for the purpose of enlightening the listener. This second communication level is where you might stop if you’re writing characters who deliver lines solely to educate the reader (world-build). This is commonly referred to as an “As you know, Bob” conversation. Here’s a tip: don’t do this. Or rather, do it sparingly. Sometimes it’s hard to avoid altogether, and dialogue is certainly a more interesting way to tell readers what they need to know than an author-narrated infodump. But if the facts don’t follow the natural flow of the conversation, and there’s no in-story need for them, you’re going to pull your readers right out. So make the facts fit in where the characters need them, not where you need them to counterbalance another deficiency in your story.
The third communication level is Opinions and Ideas. This is the point at which a person begins to inject his or herself into the conversation, but in a way that can still be relatively “safe.” Having a character share his or her opinion is a strong way to improve characterization in your writing. This includes how they share that opinion, or whether they share it at all (and perhaps only think it privately). We all know people we’d describe as “opinionated,” don’t we? Yes, I’d bet you’re thinking of just such a person right now. In fact, we’re all opinionated. We just don’t all express our opinions in the same ways. You ought to know where your characters stand, and giving them a viewpoint and a way of expressing that viewpoint goes a long way toward making them feel like a real person.
Feelings, Emotions, and Insights comprise the fourth and fifth levels, the deepest ways we communicate. This is something I see done often in drama – characters skip right to the deepest levels, either for the sake of time in a TV show, or pacing in a book. This can work, but I don’t think it’s always the best way to do it. If you have the freedom (and the space) to build up the conversation until it gets to this point, I think your dialogue will end up being stronger, overall.
Now, I don’t say all this to suggest that every dialogue sequence in your novels should begin with a five-hundred-word discussion about the weather; after all, dialogue is NOT supposed to emulate a real conversation in every aspect. Dialogue is the highlights. But a compelling dialogue sequence still needs to hit on these levels to some degree. It needs to have a progression, and you need to build the scene’s emotional resonance from start to finish if you want it to really punch your readers in the neck. And who doesn’t want to punch their readers in the neck with fantastically-written, compelling scenes, amirite?
That’s all for today. Hope these tips have helped you to think about your dialogue a little differently. Thanks for reading!