The best dialogue doesn’t explain the characters. It lets you figure them out.
There is a scene early in Jaws where Police Chief Martin Brody is riding across the harbor on a small ferry with Mayor Larry Vaughn and several other local officials.
They’re talking about a dead woman. Or, more precisely, they’re talking about what they’re going to call a dead woman.
Brody believes Chrissie Watkins was killed by a shark. The medical examiner originally agreed. Now the examiner has amended his report. Maybe it was a boating accident. The mayor thinks Brody is moving too quickly. The local newspaper editor is there. Everybody seems to understand the situation except Brody.
Nobody stops the scene to explain the situation to us.
Nobody tells Brody that Amity is run by a network of local businessmen and officials who depend on summer tourism. Nobody explains that the medical examiner is more afraid of crossing that network than he is interested in defending his original conclusion. Nobody needs to tell us that Brody, despite being the police chief, is an outsider.
We figure it out from what they say, what they won’t say, who is allowed to push whom, who backs down and who looks uncomfortable when somebody else speaks.
That is dialogue doing considerably more work than quotation marks usually get credit for.
And Jaws does it over and over again.
Give everyone in the conversation a different problem
A lot of bad dialogue begins with a perfectly reasonable question:
What information does the reader need from this scene?
The writer needs Wendy to learn that Peter sold the house. So Peter tells Wendy he sold the house. Wendy asks why. Peter explains why. Wendy tells him how she feels about that. Peter explains how he feels.
Information has successfully changed hands. The scene is dead.
Try asking a different question:
What does each person want from this conversation?
Those aren’t the same thing.
One character might want information. Another might want to end the conversation. Someone might want to conceal something. Someone might be trying to impress the other person. Someone wants permission. Someone wants to avoid giving permission without having to say no.
Now the characters aren’t cooperating with the writer anymore.
Good.
Look at that ferry scene in Jaws.
Brody wants to close the beaches because he believes there’s a shark in the water. Vaughn wants the beaches open because Amity depends on the summer season. The medical examiner has already changed his report, and the other local figures know what a closed beach means to the town.
They are discussing the same dead woman, but they aren’t having the same conversation.
Vaughn doesn’t need to announce that the summer economy matters more to him than Brody’s warning. He talks about Brody’s first summer. He talks about the seriousness of what Brody is proposing. He reminds him that Amity needs summer dollars.
Brody keeps returning to the danger.
And underneath the entire exchange is something nobody needs to say:
You don’t understand how this town works yet.
The movie trusts us to hear it anyway.
What your characters don’t say is still dialogue
This is where exposition can wreck a perfectly good scene.
Imagine a version of Jaws in which the medical examiner pulls Brody aside and says:
“Larry Vaughn pressured me to change my report because he is worried news of a shark attack will hurt tourism, and because I am part of this small community, I felt obligated to comply.”
Useful information. Terrible scene.
Instead, Brody discovers that the report has changed and confronts the situation while Vaughn and the others are right there.
Now the examiner’s discomfort matters. His retreat matters. Vaughn’s reaction matters. Brody’s inability to get anyone else to treat the contradiction with the urgency he does matters.
The relationship is contained in the reaction.
This is one of the easiest things to miss when writing dialogue. We concentrate so much on the line being spoken that we forget the other characters are still in the scene.
A character refusing to answer can tell us something. So can changing the subject, looking to someone else before answering, answering a question nobody asked or simply staying silent.
If the only way your reader understands the power dynamic is because you’ve explained it outside the dialogue, see what happens when you remove the explanation.
Can the characters show us instead?
Put an outsider in the room
Then Jaws takes Brody to the town meeting.
This is where the movie lets us see Amity almost the way Brody sees it.
The townspeople aren’t a single mass of Generic Concerned Citizens. They have businesses. Families. Boats. Opinions. Summer income on the line.
Brody announces that the beaches will be closed.
The room erupts.
That’s important because Brody and the townspeople have been given different problems.
Brody’s problem is the shark.
For many people in the room, the shark is only part of the problem. Closing the beaches creates another one.
The resulting dialogue doesn’t need to explain the economy of Amity to us. The residents do that themselves by worrying about what the closure means.
Brody has authority on paper. In the room, that authority is much less impressive.
Then somebody drags his fingernails down a chalkboard.
Quint.
Until this point, Brody has been our outsider. Now the movie introduces someone who seems even further removed from polite Amity society.
Quint doesn’t join the argument. He ends it.
His language is different. His rhythm is different. His assessment of the problem is different. Most importantly, his want is different.
The townspeople want the problem to go away. Brody wants everyone protected from it. Vaughn wants the economic threat contained. Quint wants ten thousand dollars.
He knows exactly what everyone else in that room wants, too. His pitch isn’t merely I can kill the shark. He connects killing the shark to tourists returning and businesses making money again.
Quint has listened to the room.
Then he tells them what solving their problem will cost.
Carl Gottlieb, who worked on the screenplay, later described his assignment on Jaws as rewriting dialogue and concentrating on relationships. He also had the unusual advantage of writing while the movie was being made, shaping dialogue around the specific actors rather than abstract versions of the characters.
You can feel that attention to relationships in the town meeting.
Quint doesn’t need an introductory scene explaining that he’s a difficult professional fisherman who considers himself more capable than everyone else.
He scratches the chalkboard. He names his price. We get it.
Stop making characters help you write the scene
Writers cheat with dialogue all the time.
We need the reader to know something, so one character helpfully asks exactly the question that allows another character to explain it.
We need to establish a relationship, so the characters discuss their relationship.
We need to communicate someone’s motivation, so the character describes why they’re doing what they’re doing.
The characters become collaborators in delivering the author’s information.
Real conflict becomes much easier to write when you stop letting them cooperate.
Go back to Peter and Wendy.
Suppose Peter has decided to sell the house they inherited.
Wendy wants to know why. Peter doesn’t want to talk about why.
That’s already more useful than Peter explains why he wants to sell the house.
Maybe Peter wants Wendy to sign something. Wendy wants Peter to admit that selling the house has nothing to do with money. Peter keeps discussing money because money is safer.
Now every line has two jobs: there is the conversation they’re having and the conversation they’re refusing to have.
You don’t have to tell us Peter is avoiding something. Let Wendy notice that he hasn’t answered her question.
Let her ask it differently. Let him answer a different question again. The reader will catch up. Readers are good at this.
Trust them.
Put three people on a boat
Eventually Jaws strips almost everything else away.
Brody, Quint and Matt Hooper leave Amity aboard the Orca to hunt the shark.
Now we have three men, one boat and one shared problem.
They still don’t have the same relationship to that problem.
Brody is afraid of the water and badly out of his element.
Hooper is an educated shark expert. His authority comes from knowledge, equipment and science.
Quint’s authority comes from experience. This is his boat, his profession and, increasingly, his hunt.
That distinction gives the dialogue friction before anyone starts arguing.
Hooper can know more about sharks generally while Quint believes he knows more about this shark and how to kill it.
Brody can technically be the police chief while having the least useful expertise aboard the boat.
Quint can be the hired fisherman while controlling the physical world the other two men have entered.
Their titles don’t determine their status. The scene does.
And because each character enters every exchange with a different combination of knowledge, fear, pride and purpose, they don’t need verbal gimmicks to distinguish themselves.
You could give one character a catchphrase. You could make another swear more. You could give somebody an unusual vocabulary.
Those things can create surface distinction. They don’t create a character.
A character sounds different because he wants something different.
Try the Jaws test on your own dialogue
Take a scene with at least two characters and write down what each one wants before you reread the dialogue.
Not what the scene needs to accomplish.
Not what information the reader needs.
What does each person want?
Then make it more specific.
“Wendy wants to talk about the house” isn’t enough.
Wendy wants Peter to admit why he’s selling it.
Peter wants Wendy to sign the paperwork without having that conversation.
Now reread the scene.
Does Wendy pursue what she wants?
Does Peter resist in a way that reflects what he wants?
Does either character say something only because you need the reader to know it?
Could a reaction replace an explanation?
Could silence?
Could somebody lie?
Could somebody answer the wrong question?
Could someone lose the argument while technically having more authority?
That’s where dialogue starts becoming character.
Your characters don’t know they’re in your novel
They don’t know the reader needs the backstory.
They don’t know Chapter Seven needs to establish Peter’s motivation before Chapter Eight.
They don’t know you need Wendy to discover the house is being sold.
They know what they want. Let them pursue it.
That’s what Jaws understands so well. A shark attack can mean public safety to one person, economic disaster to another and ten thousand dollars to somebody sitting in the back of the room.
Same shark. Different problem.
That’s where the dialogue comes from.