In Defense of Heightened Language
Or: Screw Realism
Somewhere along the line, “realistic dialogue” became the assumed default and/or goal for most writers. As if dialogue’s job is to perfectly replicate the boring, halting, meander of everyday speech[1]. The problem with this? “Real speech” does not exist. “Real speech” is just what you’re exposed to throughout your life and how much you’ve been trained or taken on the “cannon” of accepted lit/film/media/products. Good dialogue is best thought about like music, or a rhythm or construct that fits the world you have created. And that means you’re gonna have to… construct it.
What about writers “known” for their dialogue? Quentin Tarantino, David Mamet, Diablo Cody, Aaron Sorkin, the Coen brothers, Elmore Leonard. The language in their work is NOT realistic; it’s heightened: precise and massivelyexaggerated. It’s rhythmic, playful, and certainly not “how people speak”. Noir as a genre practically exists to build atmosphere through language that’s more lyrical than plausible. Even Anderson, Pinter, Beckett, Fuentes—they all build worlds through dialogue (or lack of it).
And then, of course, there’s the old masters that made most of us pick up a damn pen to begin with: Shakespeare, Molière, Federico García Lorca. Do we watch Hamlet because the dialogue is “naturalistic”? Obviously, they are writing in a different time period, but even for their periods they are heightening the language. Their language evokes, conjures, creates a world and the dialogue alternately takes us into that world and carves it into understandable pieces.
So why this modern obsession with “realistic dialogue”?
Partly because bad dialogue hurts. When dialogue goes tinny, ‘on-the-nosey’, vague, cliché, expository, or thin, it clangs like a dropped pipe. But here’s the trick: the problem isn’t ambitious dialogue. The problem is bad craft. Well-crafted heightened language—whether it’s Sorkin’s rat-a-tat rhythm or Beckett’s precision pauses—teaches us how to listen.
Great dialogue gives the audience a tutorial in the first five minutes. It sets a linguistic tempo and asks us to tune in. We need to learn the rules. We need to tune in to hear your frequency.
There’s a spectrum in every work (otherwise all characters sound the same). This spectrum—think Steve Buscemi in Miller’s Crossing who’s speech is so fast even the other characters in the film can’t keep up or the bellhop in The Grand Budapest Hotel ramping up into the linguistic world of the adults—this guides us through the language like a handrail on a staircase. Don’t forget that the characters in the story itself can comment on how the spectrum is functioning.
If you are in a medium that is fortunate (or unfortunate) to get actors speaking your dialogue don’t forget that a great actor doesn’t just recite words—they hear the music. They know how to play in the pocket of heightened language. There’s nothing worse than an actor trying to force heightened language into their thoroughly modern mouths/takes on acting.
Remember, realism is a cultural construct, and usually a white, male one at that. As Matthew Salesses points out, “realistic” is often shorthand for what dominant culture expects speech to sound like. Or, in his own words, ““What is called ‘realistic’ is often just what we have been trained to expect — the language, pacing, and structure of stories that have been repeatedly privileged by dominant culture. What’s ‘realistic’ for one reader may feel deeply alien to another.”[2] When we cling to “realism” as the only standard, we flatten stories, erase voices, and deny language its full, wild range.
Think of it this way: heightened dialogue is like lyrics you can’t immediately understand or decipher for their exactmeaning but feel anyway. You don’t need to decode a song to know if it’s working. Good language hits your bones before it hits your brain.
So stop obsessing over whether your dialogue sounds “real.” Ask if it sounds like itself. Ask if it has rhythm, internal logic, and purpose. Train your audience’s ear to your world. Make it sing.
[1] Though a lot of dialogue could benefit from more meandering.
[2] Craft in the Real World (Catapult, 2021), p. 9.