Because learning how to do this is a funny thing. It’s a strange art. A lot of folks out there will tell you get out there, go listen to how people talk. Sit in a bar. Eavesdrop on conversations.
Wrong.
Or at least: mostly wrong. By all means, listen in on conversations. You should be doing this anyway: Alfred Bester once wrote that writers are like magpies—always looking for shiny objects, be they plot threads, ideas, or … dialogue. An overheard phrase can be a nice acquisition. Who knows where you might be able to use it? But as to studying the rhythms of normal speech in order to replicate that on the page …
Forget it.
Because normal speech is tedious. It’s inexact. It’s filled with uhs, ums, and ers. And it’s usually duller than stale dogshit. Which is why in narrative you’re (generally) not going for normal dialogue. You’re going for idealized dialogue. You’re trying to capture what the French call the l’esprit d’escalier:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier
As in, the perfect line that you could have used as a rejoinder at the party had you actually thought of it while you were at the party. Only you didn’t. You thought of it while you were heading down the stairs to leave the building. Real life can suck that way.
Only: we're not talking about real life. We're talking about fiction. You've got endless time to come up with the ideal rejoinder, and you'd better, because it'll make things more interesting. Noir obviously is the extreme example of this: go watch Maltese Falcon again (or if you've never seen it, put it at the top of your Netflix queue), and watch how the lines fly back and forth. They fit together almost like pieces in a larger jigsaw. They also aren't grammatically precise: you can break any rule you want to in dialogue, because normal people don't talk in sentences. In fact, sentence fragments are usually way better.
But the preference of idealized dialogue over natural dialogue doesn't just operate at the sentence-by-sentence level. It should apply to your approach to the whole scene. Again, most dialogue that occurs in real life wanders. Subjects get changed. The conversation meanders. People forget why they're even talking. To have some elements of this in your short story isn't such a bad thing. It can help you prevent your dialogue from being too "on the nose"--where everybody says exactly what's on their minds, there's no hidden agendas, and everything seems a little cheesy because it's SO easy. But it's critical to keep in mind that what you're looking for in fiction writing isn't reality, it's the ILLUSION of reality. Idealized dialogue is an artifice that contributes to that illusion, and should be deployed as such.
Note: This blog post was originally from the Spectra Pulse Facebook and MySpace fan pages: Facebook | MySpace
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