Overheard Dialogue: Voice 1

Writing experiment

They hear every word, you know. Detail from a tapestry by François Spierinx in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

My next masterclass on 10 February is on Voice, so over the next weeks I’m sharing some of the writing experiments about voice that I frequently suggest to writers.

My take on voice is that we don’t need to find our voice in writing, but trust that voice we have already - the natural speaking voice - as a powerful foundation for our writing.

Gathering overheard dialogue as we listen to the speaking voices of others is a good task to help with this. Find a few examples of my own below. The oldest and most trusty exercises are so often the best, and this is a great one for training your attention.

It’s also a good exercise for taking you out of the self. When you need to silence the chatter of your own monkey mind, why not listen to other people’s monkey minds instead?

Where to record overheard dialogue

Try coffee shops, college refectories, cafeterias, or open-plan workspaces – public places where you can hear surprising, strange, or delightfully banal conversations and take down what you hear without being obvious. You can pretend you’re tapping away at that report at your laptop, when in fact you are copying down as fast as you can the account of someone else’s disastrous date last night. A privacy filter might help here if you feel cautious (your own privacy, clearly not theirs).

When I took her monologue class at Naropa, Bobbie Louise Hawkins told us to hang out in the lounge of the psychology department as the freedom of expression – and colour, and articulacy – of Buddhist psychologists would give us plenty of great material. The Boulder Book Store cafe was also a great spot for listening in: book people.

Public transport also offers rich pickings. Alan Bennett says he gets a lot of his good stuff eavesdropping on buses. I find trains better than the tube, which can create too much background noise; quieter suburban trains often invite juicy conversations between pals catching up as they head into town for a day out.

Posh people are great. The more entitled and solipsistic the better. As I live in West London there are plenty of offerings. My husband and I have a shorthand. We mumble, ‘OHD,’ and indicate with our eyes who we should listen to.

Some of the best bits of overheard dialogue are snatches I catch from people walking past me in the park or on the path by the river. They’re not quite the same as listening to whole conversations, but down those vibrant snatches go into my phone. I’ve heard a few gems in Kew Gardens too - all that nature must open people up.

Oh! And the things people say on their phones! Especially in the quiet carriage.

How to record overheard dialogue

Back in the olden days, Bobbie recommended we buy one of those small Sony audio recorders to record what we heard and then type it up. Another tip was to plug in earphones to pretend we were listening to a recording and disguise the fact we were actually making one.

Bobbie had gathered material for her book Back to Texas during a road trip with her mother to visit their West Texas family: ‘It occurred to me that if I slipped a tape recorder in and made tapes of everybody talking then when I got back home I could listen to it before I started to write and I'd be in the right tempo.’

Bobbie would talk about ‘families of storytellers’, and how many of us come from them. I am sure she would have loved the voice notes technology of today’s mobile phone. What we take for granted!

I have never been comfortable with tape recording, however. Maybe I am cowardly. Also, in certain jurisdictions making and/or sharing audio recordings might be illegal (though transcriptions are usually another matter). Ethics aside, I always found the tech cumbersome, and background noise can be a problem when you type it up. So I always preferred writing in a notebook very quickly in a shorthand of sorts.

Once upon a time I carried notebooks for this purpose. Bobbie told us to buy a bunch of cheap little notebooks from Target, and to have one in our coat pocket, one in our bag, one by the phone, etc.

Nowadays I keep most of my overheard dialogue in Pages documents that I type on my phone. You can always pretend you are sending an email, when in fact you’re tapping out that juicy conversation between that couple in the seats in front of you on the train.

Using overheard dialogue

Using your findings is a separate process: some overheard gems might provide content, sparking some brilliant idea for a story, or giving you a new direction for something you’re having trouble with.

Other samples could provide stretches of dialogue to shape or adapt for your work. Snatches of dialogue can be lifted verbatim into your own writing. Overheard dialogue made that whole book for Bobbie, and it gave her plenty of material for other writing too.

I often ask writers to prepare for workshops by collecting overheard dialogue in advance, and then in class I get them to trade a short selection with a writing partner, creating a conversation or scene that opens with the words they were given back and closes with the words they brought along themselves. When they’re done they read their pieces to each other.

There are ethical considerations, of course, but writers borrow from the world around them ALL the time. I also feel that if people are that concerned about being overheard they should conduct such conversations in private (and especially not the quiet carriage).

And it’s a lot of FUN. In Bobbie’s workshop we’d start every class by sharing overheard dialogue we’d gathered during the previous week. We’d whip out our notebooks and read our gems aloud. This could go on for thirty minutes or even an hour. People are fun, and funny, and tragic sometimes, and overheard dialogue taps right into that vitality. As Bobbie said:

When people are really talking they can be brilliant. In intermittent fast flash statements, suddenly there is that lovely little bit of brilliance never to be said again. As conversationalists we take those moments as a beautiful bonus, and then they’re gone, but as writers you should rush to another room and put it on paper, save it out of the void.¹

And let’s not just be utilitarian. Most of all I feel collecting overheard dialogue is a great exercise in listening. There’s no greater training in writing than understanding the patterns of the natural speaking voice.

Lessons in listening

• Note how spoken sentences are often short or simple, e.g., clauses of action joined by ‘and’ or ‘but’.

• Listen for the shapes of the sentences and patterns in syntax, e.g., the active vs the passive voice, the position and choice of the grammatical subject of a sentence, the clarity and power of right-branching sentences.

• Note how natural speech uses fewer complex sentences that, e.g., rely on subclauses or fronted adverbials.

• Listen for the rhythms of sentences. Note the ums and ahs and halts and repetitions, most of which would be pruned for drafted writing.

• Note the use of repetitions or other rhetorical flourishes, and how they spike energy.

• Questions really add a jolt of energy too.

• Also note the use of parts of speech. Verbs and nouns are usually most important, and adjectives and adverbs are deployed not so often.

• Notice how speech tends not to be ‘writerly’ - few of your fancy metaphors, though occasionally there will be some vivid or earthy image that grounds the language.

• And note how people telling stories often have a particular way of speaking that’s easy and direct. Speech tends to be economical: little description, little fat. And speakers assume that whoever they are talking to will get the gist of what they are saying without providing too much back story or explanation. This is something to heed in our writing – too many manuscripts labour detailed and mechanical explanations we could do without.

In particular, work out where the ENERGY lies in the voices you hear. Maybe write notes to yourself identifying some of these features in any writing you transcribe on to the page.

Tidying it up

Record everything you hear, if you can, including every um and ah and er. It’s all raw material, for you to look at later. Later on, you can type it up (if you were writing by hand), and tidy it up and shape it, though it’s interesting how little you might in fact need to do, beyond pruning those ums and ahs. Bobbie observed:

I also thought that if anybody started telling stories I could ‘improve’ them and put them in the book. That's the first time I registered how good my relatives were as storytellers. All of the stories were unimprovable. They were honed down into something incredible that I just could not improve.

There might however be subtle but sharp things to do in punctuating and organising the text:

• Think about where you might pepper the sentences you’ve heard with punctuation such as exclamation marks, dashes – for interruptions – or ellipses … for gaps … or trailing off … I suggest you might be guided here by the principle of clarity rather than accuracy.

• Consider where you might add semi-colons or commas for pauses and stops of different weights.

• You might want to break longer stretches into paragraphs, with new paragraphs for new ideas or actions - and for new speakers, of course.

• You might also want to start spacing out the dialogue with dialogue tags and/or physical description (though that’s another exercise).

• Swearing is naturalistic, but a little goes a long way in writing. Bobbie used to talk about the explosive energy of swear words in writing, and how they distract from everything else that’s on the page. Sometimes the speaker is particularly foul-mouthed, dotting every noun with a cussing adjective so that it becomes a rhythm of its own, but that almost feels like a specialist vernacular or a personal characteristic.

Trusting your voice

Find as much overheard dialogue as you can. Eating in a restaurant, waiting in a queue, walking the dog: keep your ear out. Even if you can’t take down every juicy fragment you hear, LISTEN. Absorb the patterns made by the human voice. Slow down and listen for its patterns and its energies. Grow that instinct for the sound of words, and how words can be used and put on a page.

Of course, in writing we often move beyond the natural speaking voice, adapting it for different contexts and using different styles. But the natural speaking voice is a strong place to start.

Listening is one of the greatest skills a writer can develop. Learn to listen to the world around you. It will also have an effect on how you listen to yourself, and on what you have to say and how you say it. That creative writing adage about finding your voice is a bit of a distraction - the real work lies in trusting the voices we have already, and getting them down on the page.

Some selections of overheard dialogue

• ‘I don’t want to spend my Saturday mornings sitting in a church hall listening to other people’s problems. They’re all so stupid. They were asked to sit there and come up with two things they could do to improve their marriages, and they did. One couple said it was really helpful. They’d never talked about these things before. Like, how stupid can they be? What sort of people are they?’ (At Wahaca’s burrito booth on the SouthBank.)

• ‘He knew all of the crowned heads of Europe. He married one of the Carson-Jacksons. I knew Penny way back. Almost the first girlfriend I ever had. He can be a bit chippy … He’s a very good man. I don’t think the magnums will go very far. He’s a very witty man. Beautiful manners. It’s very easy for people like him to become pompous and patronising.’ (On a train to Waterloo.)

• ‘Mud² everywhere. It’s not like that down in Oxted. It’s very muddy. If you’ve got a wood burner it’s very nice. It’s half-term. We’re thinking we might nip off to Sicily. Just for about five days. Do you think the seaside is closed already?’ (At Norbiton station.)

• ‘Judging by their reaction last night I don’t think we’ll have any problem. Only one of them seems to live in the flat.’ (The park.)

• ‘I’ve got champagne for my doctor, and Prosecco for his assistant!’ (Near Sloane Square just before Christmas.)

• ‘I know some stuff, but I can’t tell you. I really can’t. I can tell you some stuff, but other stuff I really can’t. I really can’t.’ (College kids in Twickenham.)

Further resources

• Overheard dialogue from Script Gods Must Die

• Tube Gossip: Overheard on the London Underground (Oh, how I love the language of city life – the guttural, expletive Anglo-Saxon joy of a person uttering, ‘Twat!’ at someone barging past in one example there: the force and beauty in the ugly)

• Overheard in New York

• Bobbie Louise Hawkins - and I recommend her Selected Prose especially

• And while we’re here: George Saunders devoted a month of his Story Club to Bobbie’s story The Child

• The original post on my blog

• A Case of Style - from me on Substack

And there will be plenty more about voice during my masterclass Voice on 10 February.

1. Bobbie in conversation with editor Barbara Henning in an interview in Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins (2012).

2. Pronounced mahdd.