I’m not good at writing dialogue. In fact, I’m pretty horrible at making small talk with others, including the people in my immediate social orbit. While I’m not a good conversationalist, I do listen well. I pick up on the rhythms of people’s speech, inflection, intonation, and word choice. A character comes alive through dialogue. Making them distinct from other characters is a discovery process where you differentiate from other players, ensuring they don’t sound like the same person. If character dialogue is an eclectic playlist, then bring in Metallica, Mariah Carey, Marilyn Manson, and Moby. Distinctive voices reverberate against the voices of other characters and create conflict, either through the voices themselves, or the differentiating agendas they wish to fulfill.

It took a long-ass time to create good dialogue, or dialogue I felt was real, or dialogue that I felt was appropriate for each distinctive character, or dialogue that wasn’t that similar. I’m not one of those swashbuckling masters of rhetoric who can employ a simile or anecdote with Tomahawk cruise missile precision. I adhere to the subject-verb-object agreement, nothing more, keeping it kosher on the simple-sentence level.

And then the when you indulge in the details… Let me quote Bruce Springsteen: “Sometimes you NEED to be indulged.” And then the keyboard becomes this arbiter for the different aspects of your personality and you create people who are you, but are not you, but are definitely you, but more the extreme version of one aspect of you.

And then it gets fun and you play around and mess with the characters a little bit and see how they react. Characters find themselves, championing themselves, and winning themselves to the reader as fully-realized people.

And if you write someone whom you find detestable, you ask yourself: Is that really me?