Dialogue is mostly listening

When I started writing dialogue for money, I thought the job was talking. You decide what a character needs to say, and you make it sound like them. That's part of it. But the longer I do this, the more I think dialogue is mostly listening, and the talking is what's left over afterward.

Listening in two directions. The first is out in the world. People almost never answer the question they were asked. They answer the one they heard, or the one they were afraid of, or the one they wish you'd asked. A man on the bus on Thursday told someone on the phone, "I'm not mad, I'm just saying it once," and I wrote it down before he'd finished the sentence, because every person I've ever known has said some version of that, and none of them were telling the truth. You can't invent that kind of line. You have to be in the room when someone says it.

I didn't realize how much I depended on that until last year, when I stopped riding the bus and stopped standing in kitchens with other people. My lines got tidier. People in my drafts started answering each other's questions directly, in full sentences, like witnesses. It took me months to notice what was wrong, and the fix was going back outside.

The second direction is harder, and it's specific to games. In a game, one of the people in the conversation can't talk. The player picks from a list, or picks nothing, or walks away in the middle. So every character I write has to sound as if they're listening to someone who mostly isn't saying anything. A good line in a game answers something the player didn't say: the hesitation, the fact that they came back, the fact that they're still standing there. When it works, players tell me the character "got" them. When it doesn't, the character sounds like a vending machine with a sad story.

The only exercise I trust is reading everything aloud, in the voice of the person who'll be listening to it. If I can hear myself as the player wanting to interrupt, the line is too long. If I can't hear myself wanting to answer at all, it's too closed.

What's the best thing you've overheard this year?