Why Everything You Hear in a Trader Joe's Aisle Is GOLD!
Lesson 2 - How REAL Humans Talk! Dialogue Writing Essentials

Let’s start with last week’s “Urban Safari” exercise! Firstly and most importantly: did anyone manage to get arrested? Citizen arrests count! You get 5 gold stars and a t-shirt that reads “I am an artist and I live to fuck shit up,” if so.
I want to hear what everyone stumbled across out in the big back world. So please go ahead and share the conversation you eavesdropped on in our Comments!
The sheer variety of what you guys encountered will be its own lesson in all that is possible when writing real people as they actually talk.
Share any snippet of the experience that you’d like, but if you feel moved to share your full shebang can you tell us:
Where you overheard this conversation?
What drew you to this particular conversation?
The gist of the exchange.
Anything about the arrow of the conversation or the speakers’ specific “languaging” that surprised or delighted you?
From teaching “How REAL Humans Talk!” live multiple times, I can tell you that the most dependable discovery my writers come back with is the intense odd duck specificity of people’s public conversations: A 10-minute interlude on that one soccer coach who the kids hate and why is his hair like baby chick fuzz? Whether Jennifer M. is changing her name or not when she gets married, and if baking alliteration into your kid’s name constitutes a felony or is plain ole cute. Should we go to Turks & Caicos for New Year’s Eve or should we go to Oaxaca and what’s the name of Julie’s cousin who met her future husband in that escape room in Queens? Recreations of horrendous Tinder day dates. Notes on the ghoulishness of divorce. Bunion surgery.
Life is not glamorous. Thus the clamoring mundanity of daily life on earth is one of the few quotidian delights. Which is to say: You want to be writing conversations that are constantly surprising your audience with banal specificity.
Notice also that you most likely encountered your eavesdropped conversation in the middle, AND that the speakers most likely exited or ended the conversation before total resolution was achieved—at least, at the subtext level. When we read a fantastic novel or see a film/TV show and we’re struck by our own utter and unwitting immersion in the story, often that’s because the writer did these two things: began in the middle of a conversation, and exited before any meaningful resolution.
Let’s take a peek at a scene excerpt from Greta Gerwig’s phenomenal “LADY BIRD” script. Also notice how I can just drop you (kerplop!) into the very last lap of this scene’s conversation, knowing you will very quickly find your footing—because “starting in the middle” is already the natural “in” point of most real conversations (at least, conversations that are about more than rote niceties!).