Writing Dialogue: Lies and Liars · 9:38pm Jul 8th, 2016
I have often been told that dialogue is one of my strongest areas as a writer. I find this compliment a bit unusual, because dialogue is often one of the areas that I spend the least time on. My dialogue technique involves a lot of instinct and guess work (I suppose a lot of my writing does). There is one area, however, where I did have to learn and research, because I am quite bad at it in real life.
Lying.
Characters lie like people, and that means that you can’t just make them say something untrue. You need to sell their lie, just like you would sell a lie in real life. But what does this mean and how does it look? That’s what we’re going to cover in this post.
Firstly, there is the obvious indicators. Body language, eye position and contact, sweat, voice tone, and other blunt physical signs. Most of the time, these are beyond the scope of effective prose. Because your story needs to conserve detail, mentioning these things makes it far too obvious to the audience that the character is lying. If they are a bad liar, however, then highlighting these details can help telegraph that to the audience.
Second is waffling. Liars tend to use more words than strictly needed. Rather than simply stating “no”, they might try and describe the situation, or even repeat themselves.
They also tend to make either overly specific or very vague statements. They might also use questions to avoid giving an actual answer.
Finally, lies tend to be phrased to avoid personal identification. They might phrase something in the third person, replace proper nouns with less specific identifiers, or even discuss hypothetical non-entities instead of their own activites.
So what does all this look like? Here is some examples of some lies that you might see in dialogue:
“Of course not, who would ever do something that stupid?”
“Do you think I would do something like that?”
“I have never seen that child or their parents before in my entire life.”
“It sounds like someone else’s dog might have done that.”
Obviously, dialogue relies heavily on context. Setting up a character as a liar will always be very dependent on the specific story, because the context is the most important part of the lie. Phrasing and content, however, can be great ways to show characters are lying without being blunt.
Thatnks for reading. As always, comments, counterpoints, and criticism are welcome. For further reading, watch the video that inspired this blog post: The Language of Lying — Noah Zandan
Good lesson.
Holy shit is that why nobody believes me when I'm telling the truth? Because I do that even when I'm not lying.
Makes a lot of sense. Characters lying, dodging the question, or saying things that get misunderstood is pretty much the cornerstone of creating conflict in fiction.
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I actually had a paragraph stressing the importance of lies in storytelling, but I thought it muddled the thesis statement.