Dialogue isn't conversation, but you might say that conversation is the rough draft of dialogue. In real speech you hem and haw, use “Uhs” and “You knows” as you gather and reconsider your words. While you may use these words in your dialogue to show nervousness or a reluctance to speak, a little goes a long way.

Dialogue is generally direct, to the point, and punchy. Good dialogue is both confrontational and adversarial. It provokes a response. The best dialogue is like the great lines that come to you an hour after you had a confrontation with someone — they are the perfect comeback or statement that would have been ideal to prove your point if you'd had the presence of mind to say it. Hence, dialogue isn't always what you really might say; it's more like what you wish you'd said.

Think about the last conversation you had with a friend. Chances are it was filled with a lot of simple questions and answers about the weather, a television show you saw, or other non-earth-shattering discussions. See the two examples below:

• Example 1

  “Hi. How are you?”

  “I've been doing okay. How about you?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

• Example 2

  “Good morning. Can you believe this heat?”

  “Yeah, it's just too much. Have you heard the temperature, yet?”

  “They say it's supposed to hit the hundred mark today.”

It might be hard to admit, but the basic question/answer conversation just isn't interesting, intriguing, or worthy to appear in your novels.

A public speaker is praised for being direct. Much to the contrary, dialogue is best when indirect. As Sol Stein states in his book, How to Grow a Novel, “the most important key to understanding this new language is that dialogue involves oblique responses as often as possible.”

Below are two examples of how oblique responses can add tension to everyday passages that would otherwise be too boring to include in a novel:

• Example 1

  “Hi. How are you?”

  “For God's sake. Don't pretend that you don't know.”

  “Know what?”

  “The whole world knows and I'm tired of pretending that they don't!”

• Example 2

  “Good morning.”

  “So you haven't read the paper yet.”

  “What's in the paper?”

  “The truth. For once, someone told the truth and it's not pretty.”

A good place to start developing an ear for dialogue is to listen to the soap operas on daytime television. In addition to some over-the-top drama, the writers have tapped into the art of snappy, surprising, plot-forwarding dialogue that creates both suspense and questions with its oblique answers.