In a post on Writer Unboxed, Kelsey Allagood says that what your characters don’t say can be a vital component of great dialogue. Most advice on dialogue focuses on what your characters say and how they should say it, but that can still leave you with flat conversations. One missing element, Allagood says, it what is not said.
By this, she does not mean simply “show, don’t tell,” nor having your characters simply be indirect about what they want. Instead, Allagood focuses on the topics characters avoid, the words they won’t say, the painful things they won’t give voice.
In his story “Hills Like White Elephants,” Ernest Hemingway depicts a man and a woman negotiating an important decision, but never reveals the topic. Instead, he leaves it to the reader to intuit the couple are discussing whether the woman should have an abortion. Even further, when the woman asks the man if he’ll be happy and if things will be like they were before, he does not answer directly, but deflects the question by professing his love for her.
“First, by simply avoiding any acknowledgement of the woman’s first two questions—’you’ll be happy and things will be like they were’—we, the audience, can infer that he is not comfortable promising those things because he does not believe them,” Allagood notes. “Had he outright lied to her, this would be a different story: they likely would not be having this conversation at all, because the man would have told her what she wanted to hear in order to get what he wants.” The story is filled with clever evasions and non-answers that sound good on the surface but never go to the heart of the questions asked.
Allagood also shares an example from Téa Obreht’s novel The Tiger’s Wife, in which a woman questions a bartender about the circumstances of her late grandfather’s final days. While the narrator does not explicitly raise her suspicious, they are clear in the kind of questions she asks. Neither character voices their annoyance with the other, but the clipped tones and short answers clearly suggest it.
“Part of what makes the above passages so emotionally powerful is that to understand them, the readers must be fully immersed in the page, able to draw out meaning just as we do in real life,” Allagood says. “And—speaking from experience—when readers are able to pick up on subtext, it feels satisfying as hell: like you’re having a secret, one-on-one conversation with the author.”
