I can’t write dialogue without hearing it first. I’ll cop to that right here and now.
But to be fair, I can’t make dialogue without hearing it first either.
I don’t know what it means to write. I’ve started identifying myself as a writer way before I understood what writing means. Many sharp and clever people wrote many sharp and clever pieces of great writings on writing but failed to answer the biggest question of our techno-modern age: In an era where everybody writes something to someone or on somewhere every day, what makes a writer a writer and not like everybody else?
It’s perhaps difficult to answer without first understanding what exactly it is that writers write. Writers write. That’s the golden rule. Writers, or poets too for that matter; write down sentences like “This world will grow cold one day”. And they will remind you that it won’t even be like a lump of ice or a cloud of gas, it will roll away like an empty walnut in the endless pitch black.
“Not even like a lump of ice or a cloud of gas; like an empty walnut it will roll away in the endless pitch black.”
I don’t remember when I first read this sentence. The great Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet wrote it down in 1948 while imprisoned. It served as the last verse of his three year long poem called On Living. Living, said Hikmet, is no joking matter. It needs to be lived with utmost sincerity. Like a squirrel, Hikmet said.
He actually said: “like a squirrel”. Imagine a thing like that.
I think about this sentence, that is to say; the “This world will grow cold one day” line, at least once a month. Once a month, out of nowhere, this sentence will pop up in my head fully formed and ready to go. This world will grow cold one day. Now that I’ve relayed it, it will pop up in your head as well. Because it’s true. This world will grow cold one day and it won’t even be like a lump of ice or a cloud of gas; it will roll away like an empty walnut in the endless pitch black.
I’m willing to bet anything I own on the fact that the first person to hear that line was Hikmet himself.
Because writers write and writers write what they know. No writer, alive or dead; has ever put to paper something that never existed. You can try it, God knows Shakespeare certainly did; but all you’ll ever come close to achieving is giving an abstract concept a solid name. You can’t make up an emotion. You can’t conceive movements that haven’t been taken. You can’t have your character say something you haven’t heard before. So by using this logic, we can come to the simple conclusion staring at us in the face: Writers write, yes; but before any of all that, they sit down and observe.
They observe the heartbreak and the pain, the pangs of feeling unwanted and the scorns of being hunted; the simplicity of seeing something beautiful for the first time and the hollowness of realizing you’ll never reach it. Writers take a look, a real look at all these things that pile up beneath the eyeball and then they just try to match these to words they already know, words that have been taught, passed down from generation to generation. None of these little phrases are original and because language is a social art; and none of them can ever be fully original as they need to be understood. So writers then try to trick the reader into thinking they’re reading something new by combining the original observation with thoroughly unoriginal phrases and tropes, lengthening out a single strand of life into an alternate reality that looks a lot like ours but is not ours and will never be fully ours. Then somebody else comes along, takes the derivative originality presented by the author and having been convinced by the author themselves that this is new, they take and make it into something not-new, until the not-new is drowning in the not-old so much that it starts looking like new once again.
If this is confusing, just know that I’m trying to explain what I understood when I first read If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino in a couple of paragraphs. It was a book about writing, and reading, and books, and readers. It was a book that contained books and non-books about the act of reading, writing and even owning a book. It was a book that understood there are no original books and by understanding that, became dangerously close to becoming an original book until you read and you realize that it wasn’t the author that was making it original; it was you, the named main character of the book, as “You”, as the reader is always just “you” and nothing more.
I’m trying to say that writers write what they know and what they know is other books, so writers write the same thing over and over again. Until, that is, they hit dialogue.
Dialogue is something else. There are two types of dialogue any writer will ever hope to write. One is the fake one. The fugazi, the airball. It’s just the dialogue that needs to happen for the plot to move forward. These types of dialogues are called “exposition” sometimes by people in the know about the terms of things and they do what they advertise they are going to: They expose the railings. The plot can’t veer too much to the left or too much to the right, because then it could fall down and implode. That would be very tragic, so there are railings. The author masks these railings but sometimes the author themselves need to hang on to them because it’s not just the reader that can lose the plot; the author does that a lot too.
Then there’s the second type of dialogue a writer encounters in their lifetime: The organic one. The ones we write and perform everyday without giving it a second thought. The one that is defined by the only real thing in this world other than a state of play. The one that is musical.
Imagine a conversation in your head. Make up a location, put two characters in it and have them take the action of conversing. What’s the first thing one of the characters will say? Hello, perhaps? Does the other one feel like they’d say Hi? Maybe the first one will sit down after that, prompting the other one to do that as well. Maybe it’s taking place in the second one’s office, so they’re behind a desk; they make a small gesture towards the chair in front of the desk before sitting down.
Hold on. This is getting confusing now. Let’s call the one that says “Hello” Despina and the one that says “Hi” Kamil. Start from the top.
Despina enters the room, which is decorated in an official yet subdued fashion, looks at Kamil and says “Hello”. Despina stands up, says “Hi”, gestures towards the chair in front of the desk and they both sit down.
Then they exchange pleasantries. How’s the family, how’s the kids; the usual stuff. Maybe they talk about the weather, maybe not. Depends on how familiar they are to each other. Let’s say they’re meeting for the first time. They’re now taking a measure of one another through silent routines. They ask and observe, respond and consolidate. Then somebody, doesn’t matter which body, starts the real conversation.
Kamil says, “So what do you do?”
“Oh I’m studying” says Despina, “I’m doing my masters right now.”
“Oh? What about?”
“Art. Art in the city, to be specific. Do you see this blood splatter on the ground?”
Despina then points her finger to the ground. They’re at a bus station. It’s the middle of the night, there’s no one around. The bus station has a weak light hitting the pavement below and Despina is pointing to a pool of blood.
“I began a project chronicling the splatters of blood you see in city floors, because they each tell a story. I take pictures of it and try to come up with a story to match the surroundings.”
“That sounds wonderful.” says Kamil.
“Does it?” asks Despina. Kamil nods, then she continues: “So what do you do?”
“Oh this and that” says Kamil, “I read and I write, that’s about all I can do.”
“What do you write?” asks Despina, looking genuinely interested.
“I don’t know. That’s a tough question to answer. I’m trying to learn how to live before I figure out what I want to write.”
“And what did you come up with so far?”
“I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Balance.”
“Why?”
“Because I seek balance by nature and I fear that I won’t have anything to write if I achieve it.”
“Why would that be?”
“What do you mean?”
“Balance isn’t zero. If you’re looking for zero, you’re looking for balance wrong. Balance is one minus one.”
“So you go to one extreme…”
“…and then take the other.”
“As simple as that?”
“As simple as that.”
“Good.” says Kamil, in case you’re finding it hard to follow who’s saying what.
“I’m glad.” says Despina, looking back into the void.
“You don’t sound glad.” responds Kamil.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m afraid too.”
“What scares you?”
“Walls.”
“Explain.”
“I want to go into academics, because I love learning and I love telling others what I know. But all the academics I know spend their whole lives behind walls and I’m afraid I’ll lose touch of real things.”
“Like the pools of blood that collect on city pavements?”
“Or another thing like that, yeah.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would you go into academics anyway? It’s the digital age, right? Everyone’s everything and nothing’s nothing; so whatever you do will end up being something. Study what you want to study, without anyone’s permission and validation; then share what you want to know with whoever you’d like to share it with.”
An expression of understanding flashed across Despina’s face. Kamil smiled. She smiled back. Without knowing or realizing, they gave each other mantras that will last their lifetimes. Then a bus comes; takes Despina, leaves Kamil behind. Kamil gets mugged. Muggers leave. Kamil’s bus finally comes and it’s suddenly the end of the story.
What happened here, what really happened here was that one night in a bus station I met a girl and we had a conversation. In this conversation she reminded me of a different way of approaching balance and I reminded her a different way of approaching academia. This conversation happened differently than the version I’ve transcribed before but the cadence of it remained the same. I could have kept that story in that official looking office or maybe made it so that one of the characters was a French revolutionary in the year 1848 and the other one is a royalist fighting to preserve the monarchy. The topics might have changed in that instance as computers weren’t invented yet; so perhaps one character could be afraid of the liberal world and the other could be afraid of taking orders from someone less divine. Doesn’t matter. As long as you get the cadence right, you can change the dressing however you like.
Because all humans make music when they talk and music is always running in the background.
Somebody says something and the other one responds within seconds, without thinking it and without thinking about it. Think about it. The syllables in each sentence are the work of millenia, whittling down the unnecessary sounds until a perfect self-explanatory lump is left. You say the word, and you say it in a way the other person can understand it on a molecular level and then thus will respond to it on a molecular level; which is to say, understand and respond to it as if it was real; as if it was pure music, because it is pure music. Because we all know how to respond to pure music. It’s ingrained in our DNA, our brain. Our sense of rhythm is what allows us to walk after all and in the end, it’s also the thing that allows us to talk.
Somebody says something and the other one responds within seconds. The writer has to think about it without thinking about it. The characters need to be finishing each other’s sentences not just with meaning, but with an overwhelming sense of unified melody and image. And as human beings, we like our music predictable and familiar with only a small alteration. Real and almost real. Not-new and new. Original and the rest.
So yes, I can’t write dialogue without hearing it first. I hear them in my head, just like you. I hear it when somebody says “Hello” to me and I almost feel obligated to say “Hi.”. Not “Sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken” . Hi. Because that’s what I heard that day and that’s what felt like the next step in this gigantic composition we’re all living in making.
Just make sure to remember. More days equal more words. Everything else is just the same.
I can’t write dialogue without hearing it first. I’ll cop to that right here and now.
But to be fair, I can’t make dialogue without hearing it first either.
I don’t know what it means to write. I’ve started identifying myself as a writer way before I understood what writing means. Many sharp and clever people wrote many sharp and clever pieces of great writings on writing but failed to answer the biggest question of our techno-modern age: In an era where everybody writes something to someone or on somewhere every day, what makes a writer a writer and not like everybody else?
It’s perhaps difficult to answer without first understanding what exactly it is that writers write. Writers write. That’s the golden rule. Writers, or poets too for that matter; write down sentences like “This world will grow cold one day”. And they will remind you that it won’t even be like a lump of ice or a cloud of gas, it will roll away like an empty walnut in the endless pitch black.
“Not even like a lump of ice or a cloud of gas; like an empty walnut it will roll away in the endless pitch black.”
I don’t remember when I first read this sentence. The great Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet wrote it down in 1948 while imprisoned. It served as the last verse of his three year long poem called On Living. Living, said Hikmet, is no joking matter. It needs to be lived with utmost sincerity. Like a squirrel, Hikmet said.
He actually said: “like a squirrel”. Imagine a thing like that.
I think about this sentence, that is to say; the “This world will grow cold one day” line, at least once a month. Once a month, out of nowhere, this sentence will pop up in my head fully formed and ready to go. This world will grow cold one day. Now that I’ve relayed it, it will pop up in your head as well. Because it’s true. This world will grow cold one day and it won’t even be like a lump of ice or a cloud of gas; it will roll away like an empty walnut in the endless pitch black.
I’m willing to bet anything I own on the fact that the first person to hear that line was Hikmet himself.
Because writers write and writers write what they know. No writer, alive or dead; has ever put to paper something that never existed. You can try it, God knows Shakespeare certainly did; but all you’ll ever come close to achieving is giving an abstract concept a solid name. You can’t make up an emotion. You can’t conceive movements that haven’t been taken. You can’t have your character say something you haven’t heard before. So by using this logic, we can come to the simple conclusion staring at us in the face: Writers write, yes; but before any of all that, they sit down and observe.
They observe the heartbreak and the pain, the pangs of feeling unwanted and the scorns of being hunted; the simplicity of seeing something beautiful for the first time and the hollowness of realizing you’ll never reach it. Writers take a look, a real look at all these things that pile up beneath the eyeball and then they just try to match these to words they already know, words that have been taught, passed down from generation to generation. None of these little phrases are original and because language is a social art; and none of them can ever be fully original as they need to be understood. So writers then try to trick the reader into thinking they’re reading something new by combining the original observation with thoroughly unoriginal phrases and tropes, lengthening out a single strand of life into an alternate reality that looks a lot like ours but is not ours and will never be fully ours. Then somebody else comes along, takes the derivative originality presented by the author and having been convinced by the author themselves that this is new, they take and make it into something not-new, until the not-new is drowning in the not-old so much that it starts looking like new once again.
If this is confusing, just know that I’m trying to explain what I understood when I first read If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino in a couple of paragraphs. It was a book about writing, and reading, and books, and readers. It was a book that contained books and non-books about the act of reading, writing and even owning a book. It was a book that understood there are no original books and by understanding that, became dangerously close to becoming an original book until you read and you realize that it wasn’t the author that was making it original; it was you, the named main character of the book, as “You”, as the reader is always just “you” and nothing more.
I’m trying to say that writers write what they know and what they know is other books, so writers write the same thing over and over again. Until, that is, they hit dialogue.
Dialogue is something else. There are two types of dialogue any writer will ever hope to write. One is the fake one. The fugazi, the airball. It’s just the dialogue that needs to happen for the plot to move forward. These types of dialogues are called “exposition” sometimes by people in the know about the terms of things and they do what they advertise they are going to: They expose the railings. The plot can’t veer too much to the left or too much to the right, because then it could fall down and implode. That would be very tragic, so there are railings. The author masks these railings but sometimes the author themselves need to hang on to them because it’s not just the reader that can lose the plot; the author does that a lot too.
Then there’s the second type of dialogue a writer encounters in their lifetime: The organic one. The ones we write and perform everyday without giving it a second thought. The one that is defined by the only real thing in this world other than a state of play. The one that is musical.
Imagine a conversation in your head. Make up a location, put two characters in it and have them take the action of conversing. What’s the first thing one of the characters will say? Hello, perhaps? Does the other one feel like they’d say Hi? Maybe the first one will sit down after that, prompting the other one to do that as well. Maybe it’s taking place in the second one’s office, so they’re behind a desk; they make a small gesture towards the chair in front of the desk before sitting down.
Hold on. This is getting confusing now. Let’s call the one that says “Hello” Despina and the one that says “Hi” Kamil. Start from the top.
Despina enters the room, which is decorated in an official yet subdued fashion, looks at Kamil and says “Hello”. Despina stands up, says “Hi”, gestures towards the chair in front of the desk and they both sit down.
Then they exchange pleasantries. How’s the family, how’s the kids; the usual stuff. Maybe they talk about the weather, maybe not. Depends on how familiar they are to each other. Let’s say they’re meeting for the first time. They’re now taking a measure of one another through silent routines. They ask and observe, respond and consolidate. Then somebody, doesn’t matter which body, starts the real conversation.
Kamil says, “So what do you do?”
“Oh I’m studying” says Despina, “I’m doing my masters right now.”
“Oh? What about?”
“Art. Art in the city, to be specific. Do you see this blood splatter on the ground?”
Despina then points her finger to the ground. They’re at a bus station. It’s the middle of the night, there’s no one around. The bus station has a weak light hitting the pavement below and Despina is pointing to a pool of blood.
“I began a project chronicling the splatters of blood you see in city floors, because they each tell a story. I take pictures of it and try to come up with a story to match the surroundings.”
“That sounds wonderful.” says Kamil.
“Does it?” asks Despina. Kamil nods, then she continues: “So what do you do?”
“Oh this and that” says Kamil, “I read and I write, that’s about all I can do.”
“What do you write?” asks Despina, looking genuinely interested.
“I don’t know. That’s a tough question to answer. I’m trying to learn how to live before I figure out what I want to write.”
“And what did you come up with so far?”
“I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Balance.”
“Why?”
“Because I seek balance by nature and I fear that I won’t have anything to write if I achieve it.”
“Why would that be?”
“What do you mean?”
“Balance isn’t zero. If you’re looking for zero, you’re looking for balance wrong. Balance is one minus one.”
“So you go to one extreme…”
“…and then take the other.”
“As simple as that?”
“As simple as that.”
“Good.” says Kamil, in case you’re finding it hard to follow who’s saying what.
“I’m glad.” says Despina, looking back into the void.
“You don’t sound glad.” responds Kamil.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m afraid too.”
“What scares you?”
“Walls.”
“Explain.”
“I want to go into academics, because I love learning and I love telling others what I know. But all the academics I know spend their whole lives behind walls and I’m afraid I’ll lose touch of real things.”
“Like the pools of blood that collect on city pavements?”
“Or another thing like that, yeah.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would you go into academics anyway? It’s the digital age, right? Everyone’s everything and nothing’s nothing; so whatever you do will end up being something. Study what you want to study, without anyone’s permission and validation; then share what you want to know with whoever you’d like to share it with.”
An expression of understanding flashed across Despina’s face. Kamil smiled. She smiled back. Without knowing or realizing, they gave each other mantras that will last their lifetimes. Then a bus comes; takes Despina, leaves Kamil behind. Kamil gets mugged. Muggers leave. Kamil’s bus finally comes and it’s suddenly the end of the story.
What happened here, what really happened here was that one night in a bus station I met a girl and we had a conversation. In this conversation she reminded me of a different way of approaching balance and I reminded her a different way of approaching academia. This conversation happened differently than the version I’ve transcribed before but the cadence of it remained the same. I could have kept that story in that official looking office or maybe made it so that one of the characters was a French revolutionary in the year 1848 and the other one is a royalist fighting to preserve the monarchy. The topics might have changed in that instance as computers weren’t invented yet; so perhaps one character could be afraid of the liberal world and the other could be afraid of taking orders from someone less divine. Doesn’t matter. As long as you get the cadence right, you can change the dressing however you like.
Because all humans make music when they talk and music is always running in the background.
Somebody says something and the other one responds within seconds, without thinking it and without thinking about it. Think about it. The syllables in each sentence are the work of millenia, whittling down the unnecessary sounds until a perfect self-explanatory lump is left. You say the word, and you say it in a way the other person can understand it on a molecular level and then thus will respond to it on a molecular level; which is to say, understand and respond to it as if it was real; as if it was pure music, because it is pure music. Because we all know how to respond to pure music. It’s ingrained in our DNA, our brain. Our sense of rhythm is what allows us to walk after all and in the end, it’s also the thing that allows us to talk.
Somebody says something and the other one responds within seconds. The writer has to think about it without thinking about it. The characters need to be finishing each other’s sentences not just with meaning, but with an overwhelming sense of unified melody and image. And as human beings, we like our music predictable and familiar with only a small alteration. Real and almost real. Not-new and new. Original and the rest.
So yes, I can’t write dialogue without hearing it first. I hear them in my head, just like you. I hear it when somebody says “Hello” to me and I almost feel obligated to say “Hi.”. Not “Sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken” . Hi. Because that’s what I heard that day and that’s what felt like the next step in this gigantic composition we’re all living in making.
Just make sure to remember. More days equal more words. Everything else is just the same.
