An Unlimited Well of Great Dialogue Most Writers Ignore

How to capture some of the best one-liners in your next book

I’m a dirty thief. There, I said it. Slap the cuffs on me, duck my head, and shove me in the back of the cruiser. Guilty. As. Charged. But you can’t prove it. There’s no evidence. They’ll probably let me off on some technicality.

I’ve got a secret. I steal dialogue. Since college I’ve collected great one-liners.

Dialogue thievery is a stealthy process for some, while overt with others. All you need is a reliable capture device. Whether you copy your dialogue in a notebook or leave yourself a message in your phone (DO NOT RECORD PEOPLE’S CONVERSATIONS), the capture device doesn’t matter — as long as you carry one.

Reality is so much better than fiction.

Dialogue is difficult. You’ve got to get it right or your story will fall off the rails faster than a fly licking a fan. As writers we’ve got our favorite sentences. This is where editors save us from ourselves. Dialogue’s the same. We repeat ourselves if we’re not careful. We might write a different version of the same conversation a dozen times throughout our manuscript.

Enter: stolen dialogue.

Now, I’m not one to say what you can and can’t do with your collected sentences. Keep the words verbatim. Change them to protect the innocent. Alteration is up to you.

I like to record the one-liners as-spoken. Later, I’ll alter them or not.

Sources of stolen dialogue

• Dinner parties and friends — this is where I get some of my best material. When people are loose. I guess it’s more of a ‘guy thing,’ but when I’m with my friends the way we connect is to make fun of each other ruthlessly. These conversations are dialogue gold. Maybe your friends are more refined. If that’s the case you can borrow mine.
• Walmart — or pick your favorite big box store where you live. Shop. Carry your phone or notebook in your hand. The capture device will look like a grocery list. As you work the aisles couples will argue, hillbillies will hillbilly, and you’ll collect some of the best gifts since Christmas.
• Work — here, you’ve got to be a little more stealthy and rely on your memory for capture. Work is a great place to find dialogue bits about people complaining.
• The street — a you’re living life pay attention. People are everywhere. Watch and listen. Observe how they interact. What do they say? What do they NOT say? What you leave out from your dialogue may be more important than what you put in. People say a lot less aloud than you think.
• Movies and shows — grab the lesser-known stuff, not the ‘I’m a glass case of emotions’ ones that everyone’s heard.
• Kids’ cartoons — the new cartoons are filled with fantastic dialogue.
• Your favorite authors — borrow and make the words yours by changing them a little.

Uses of stolen dialogue

Ever read a single line of dialogue, or any prose, and have it stick with you the rest of the chapter? One perfect sentence has lasting power. Every word counts, but we can’t be Picasso with every line. The book wouldn’t sound right.

I try to incorporate 2–3 of these great one-liners in a short story and at least one ‘oh yeah’ piece of dialogue per novel scene. I want the reader to walk away with her time well-spent.

Maybe that’s formulaic. I don’t care. I do it for the reader.

I don’t always meet this goal. I think I’m a lot more cleaver than I appear to the rest of the world. Milestones are important, regardless — else we’ve got nothing to hit.

It’s not just dialogue that will help you.

I write crime thrillers. I also love Raymond Chandler, the king of the simile (“a face like a collapsed lung”). I don’t copy his work directly. Instead, I absorb it as often as I can. I try to stuff his technique in my subconscious, so, when needed, I’ll have the tools to craft my own.

Writing is a collection of our life’s experiences — exaggerated and distorted.

Not the spaceships, dragons, and murder, but the human behavior in between. If we don’t pay attention and be mindful to all the human behavior around us — to study people like a psychologist — our work will go stale once we hit our experience limit.

Raise your limit.

Examples?

Sure. I scrolled through my list and grabbed a few. I won’t tell you where they came from. It’s part of the magic. Sure, your friends offer unsuspecting help to your novel, but they won’t mind… you don’t have to tell them if you don’t want to. Worked for Quentin Tarantino. It’ll work for you.

Here are a few from the last couple months:

“I’m a suicide bomber of humiliation. Your shame is my paradise.”

“I’m the one who screwed it up, so I’m the one who has to screw it down.”

“Her voice was ravaged from years of nicotine.”

“His face was a mustache.”

“West Virginia chrome” (duct tape)

“He can smell the barn” (reference to closing-in on the finish line)

“He was a hard-ass, ax handle from Texas”

Great artists steal

There’s nothing ‘original’ which hasn’t evolved from something great before it. We’re writers because we build on all we know. We take our life and all the sensory experiences we’ve packed inside, and we twist all that living into something new.

Dialogue is hard to get right.

There are plenty of ways to do it wrong.

For most of your dialogue, remove 50% of each sentence and I’ll bet it will improve 300%.

We start late and finish early.

“Coming?” NOT “Are you coming with me, or what?”

“Hear that?” NOT “Did you hear a noise?”

“She make it?” NOT “Detective, did that woman survive the accident?”

Listen to the way people ACTUALLY speak, not the way you feel you need to explain the dialogue in your scene. You can add the details with actions and a little exposition.

We speak in partial sentences. Grammar rules are little more than a whisper when it comes to dialogue. Most rules are off the table.

Only really talkative people explain everything. Maybe you’ve got a run-on-sentence character who speaks that way — cool. But the rest of your characters don’t.

Skip the dialect

Avoid adding too many regional accents and misspelled words. You can organize your dialogue in such a way to match the person speaking, but avoid the accents and the rest. Even Mark Twain’s dialogue is hard to read sometimes.

It’s time to start stealing

We need your work to pop. We want to remember your chapter hours after we read it. We want to hit that one, perfect sentence that makes us flop the book to our laps and say “holy shit.”

Keep your capture device close.

It doesn’t matter what you use. Capture everything that sticks with you. Don’t try to remember these tidbits for later. You won’t. Record them now. Ignore or delete them later.

We can always edit, but we can’t bring back what isn’t there.

Dialogue can break your story. There’s nothing worse than stumbling through endless conversations that could’ve been covered in a few lines. Look at the pacing.

Watch how people interact with each other.

Vacuum your friends and family for great one-liners.

We need your work to be great. There’s so much bad writing out there. Please save us from the mediocrity.

We’re waiting for you.

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