Writing Dialogue Where Nobody Says the Real Thing

Here is a fight you have witnessed, possibly participated in, certainly written badly at some point. Two people who love each other are standing in a kitchen, and the real subject between them is enormous — a betrayal, a diagnosis, a grief, the slow discovery that they have become strangers — and what they are actually saying, out loud, with feeling, is this:

“The milk’s gone off.”

“It’s fine.”

“It is not fine, it’s basically yogurt.”

That is the whole scene, and if you write it correctly it will contain the betrayal and the diagnosis and the twenty years, and neither character will go anywhere near any of it, and the reader will be devastated. This is the single most useful thing I know about dialogue, and the beginners never believe it, because it feels like cheating: people do not say the real thing. In the moments that matter most, they say the nearest safe thing, and the real thing sits under the table, and everyone at the table can feel it against their legs.

The rule the beginner breaks

The instinct, when you are learning, is to have people say what they mean. It seems like honesty, like good clear writing. So the grieving son turns to his mother and says, “I feel that we have never really understood each other, and that Dad’s death has made me realize how much time we’ve wasted,” and it is terrible, it is a cushion with the stuffing pulled out, and the reason it fails is that no son has ever said that to his mother in the history of the species. What the son says is “Do you want tea.” What the son says is “You’ve let this place go.” What the son says is nothing at all; he just starts, unaccountably, doing the dishes, hard, with his back to her.

Real speech, in the pressured moments, is a system for not saying things. It exists to manage the unbearable by talking about the bearable instead. And the writer’s job is not to make the characters finally, cathartically say the real thing — the writer’s job is to make the reader hear it anyway, loud and clear, precisely because no one will touch it. The unsaid thing is not absent from the scene. It is the loudest thing in it. You are writing around a hole in exactly the way that makes the hole visible.

How you actually do it

The mechanism is simple to describe and hard to do, and it is this: you give the characters a small, safe, concrete argument to have on the surface, and you make sure that every move in the small argument is secretly a move in the large one.

The milk is not about the milk. When she says the milk is fine, she is saying do not come in here and manage me. When he says it is basically yogurt, he is saying you are not coping and we both know it and I am terrified. When she refuses to throw it out, she is defending something that has nothing to do with dairy. Two people conduct an entire war over the contents of a fridge, and not one shell is fired directly, and the reader — this is the magic — the reader translates it effortlessly, in real time, without being told, because the reader has had this exact fight, about the milk, about the thermostat, about whose turn it was, and knows perfectly well it was never about the milk.

You are relying, in other words, on the reader being a person. People are experts in subtext. They have to be; it is how families run. So you do not have to explain the hidden subject. You just have to make sure it is genuinely there, pressing up under every innocent line, and then you have to trust the reader to feel the pressure — which means the hardest part of the technique is not writing the subtext. It is resisting the urge to reach in and label it, to have someone finally say of course this isn’t really about the milk, which detonates the whole thing, because the instant a character names the subtext, it stops being subtext and starts being a therapy session.

The tells you are doing it right

You will know it is working when the scene starts to frighten you a little, because that is what a real conversation about an avoided thing does — it frightens the people having it, which is precisely why they are avoiding it. Watch for the tells. The over-correct politeness. The joke that is one degree too sharp. The sudden fascination with a task — the dishes, the coat being smoothed, the phone checked for no reason — because busy hands are how people keep the mouth from saying the thing. The question asked and not answered. The subject changed a half-second too fast. These are not filler. These are the whole event. A character who abruptly asks whether you’ve eaten, in the middle of the worst conversation of your life, is not making small talk. She is throwing a rope across the hole so that neither of you falls in, and if you write that gesture precisely, the reader will understand everything about how much she cannot bear to lose you, and you will not have used a single one of those words.

Why the gothic needs this most of all

Every kind of fiction can use subtext, but the gothic depends on it, because the gothic is fundamentally the genre of the unspeakable — the thing in the family, in the house, in the past, that is known by everyone and said by no one. A haunting, at bottom, is a subtext that has gotten loose. The ghost is the thing nobody would say, walking around. So the dialogue in a gothic story has to do double duty: it has to be a realistic surface of people declining to say the real thing, and it has to make the reader feel that the real thing is now large enough, and unsaid for long enough, that it has started to move the furniture.

Get that right and you will not need the ghost to say anything. Your characters will already be conducting a séance every time they discuss the weather, summoning, between the lines, the dead subject that everyone can feel in the room and no one will name — which is, when you take the sheet off it, just a family at dinner, being careful, while the thing they will not talk about sits down at the table and waits.