I watched Glengarry Glen Ross again the other day to refresh myself on the dialogue, as its some of the snappiest dialogue from which you could hope to draw an example.

After refilling the dialogue inspiration well, I fired up good old Wikipedia and dialed in David Mamet just to see what they had to say about him, in the hopes maybe they could shed some light on his process for writing snappy banter.

Here are some things they had to say:

“He often uses italics and quotation marks to highlight particular words and to draw attention to his characters’ frequent manipulation and deceitful use of language. His characters frequently interrupt one another, their sentences trail off unfinished, and their dialogue overlaps.”

Colorful and realistic, if perhaps hyperreal. The quick comebacks and witty nature of every character is somewhat superhuman. Where is the much more realistic example of someone being insulted and only thinking of a good response after the situation as passed? Ah, but yes… reality is boring. And we still haven’t learned much, so I perused some more;

“Mamet dedicated Glengarry Glen Ross to Harold Pinter, who was instrumental in its being first staged at the Royal National Theatre, in 1983, and whom Mamet has acknowledged as an influence on its success, and on his other work.”

Ok, so I felt it necessary to fire up Harold Pinter in the search;

“Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution. Pinter’s drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theatre, but has later more aptly been characterised as ‘comedy of menace’, a genre where the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations. In a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled existence. Another principal theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past.”

To write on the nose dialogue is to have one of your characters say, “I’m angry.” I remember reading about one of the tricks Donald Westlake uses, which is to “write around the emotion without actually stating it.”

Instead of having your character state they are angry, you have them punch a wall or growl in frustration. A more convincing anger, the theory goes, is the anger that the character has difficulty expressing.

Guys like Pinter and Mamet take this one step further. Instead of being unable to express their feelings, characters are often intentionally hide their feelings, or hints about their true identities — that is, if they have true identities and aren’t just subverting the identities of others.

In other words, being Pinteresque means that your characters often manipulate others’ perception through use of language and veiled intent. While this may seem like the tactic of a villain, if you think about your heroes hard enough you can probably find reasons why they too would want to manipulate another character’s perception of the truth in order to protect or be helpful. Don’t heroes in popular stories get into trouble all the time with little white lies?

The easiest way to avoid writing on the nose dialogue? Make your characters somewhat passive-aggressive. They never say what they mean. They shift, alter, and manipulate the conversation to present either reality as they see it, or better yet the reality they want others to believe.

How easy is it to do all this in practice? Not so easy. I often find myself writing a description like, “Bob shifted in his seat, uncomfortable.” Uncomfortable is a direct statement of the feeling. How do you fix it?

If you need to use the words as crutches to get yourself through a first pass, go ahead and do so. On a later pass, go through and remove all direct references to feeling. Then subvert them. Find some other way to express it besides just stating it directly. Make the characters squirm, bite their nails, twirl a lock of hair around a finger. Find an action or expression of that feeling that doesn’t involve words related to it.

Key takeaways:

• Don’t state emotions in your prose.
• If you can’t help but state an emotion when writing a scene, make a second pass and delete all mentions of emotion. See how your scene reads.
• Translate and telegraph character emotions. An angry character doesn’t say how angry they are, they throw a vase instead. A nervous character doesn’t tell a friend how nervous they are — they pace around, biting their nails and mumbling about a different time and place when things were better.

If your characters are to be real people that means they’re trying to contain and hide emotions just like real people do. Even if they fail at it. In fact…

You want them to fail at it.