Writing a scene is more than just working out the people and how they would carry out their goals. It’s also how they interact with each other while trying to convince others of their positions or dismiss their objections. It’s how they interact with their environment. Ultimately it’s what these words and actions say and don’t say about what they want and what they value.

So, once I have the basics of a scene blocked out I ask myself how direct they would be in talking about what they want. A Candle in the Wind is our case study for this series and it has a couple of examples of this. The best is probably the meeting between Sheriff Avery Warwick and the Fairchild siblings. The sheriff suspects the Fairchilds are working with Harper, who he’s just sent out of town so he won’t cause any problems. Which they are. Brandon and Cassie are trying to figure out what’s happening in Riker’s Cove while also not getting kicked out by the sheriff and, in Brandon’s case, upholding the first tenant of Avaloni chivalry – to seek the truth. In other words, Brandon doesn’t want to lie directly to Avery. Both characters are pursuing goals they cannot state explicitly to the other – but they still need the other to do something for them.

Much of the dialog in these scenes is constructed so that the two men serve these goals without ever explicitly bringing them up. Most people will describe this as showing the characters are intelligent. There is certainly an element of that to writing characters with subtext, as intelligence is an important factor in recognizing subtext and both characters do pick up on some of what the other is trying to do. Likewise, less intelligent actors tend to have less subtext. But adding subtext is more than just a reflection of intelligence; it is a way to give insight.

In his final duel with Heinrich von Nighburg, Roy baffles his opponent with his resistance to the other’s mental push towards anger. In his dialog he points out that his anger comes from showing up late and short on silver. This reveals that Roy’s real emotional vulnerability isn’t anger, it’s guilt. He becomes angry with himself when he feels he had a responsibility to help others that he couldn’t fulfill and that anger leaks out. Nighburg would have done better to push him towards guilt rather than bait him into anger but his understanding of Roy was too superficial to understand that.

I could have written this in plain language. However, Roy Harper isn’t a character who is comfortable with strangers, especially those who are out to kill him, so it’s not something it would be in character for him to state plainly. Furthermore, it’s more interesting for the audience to work it out from the subtext than see it so stated.

It’s important to have moments of subtext woven into your scenes. It doesn’t have to come from dialog, although these are the most obvious examples, but can come from interacting with objects as well. Say you have a protagonist who was given a keepsake by a parent who hated violence. Having the character holding that keepsake or even fiddling with it while debating the ethics of using lethal force creates a subtext to all the character’s arguments, for or against, without need any explicit dialog or exposition.

In a visual medium subtext can also be established by character expressions. Smiling while saying you’re sorry is a fairly blunt way to create subtext, a character looking at the door while promising to stay is another. This kind of visual subtext can be used in prose but it’s often very on point. I prefer to use it when a character is realizing another character’s subtext rather than as a way to signal subtext to the audience.

How you integrate subtext into your narrative is up to you. There’s a lot of different ways to do it but I’d recommend picking one or two and really honing them before trying another one. You don’t need a huge amount of subtext in a scene. Keep adding it and eventually it’s just the text of the scene so it’s better to be good at delivering it than having a bunch of different ways to work it in.

I put dialog and subtext together because I like to try and write dialog that introduces subtext. (Whether I succeed or not is not my place to say.) However there are also other techniques I try to keep in mind while writing dialog and, while not a process per se, these rules of thumb are things I find helpful when trying to put one word after another.

Characters should have preferred kinds of metaphors. Roy speaks in terms of fighting and army life most of the time but sometimes lapses into the language of his religion, the Mated Pair. This reflects his general outlook on life and his background. I’ve written a character who grew up as a grove tender and for whom I deliberately wrote down a series of tree based similes that I looked for every chance to use.

Analogies and metaphors grounded in real-world history and culture can be used in some cases. Obviously if your story is set in the present day feel free. Otherwise, depending on how deep you want immersion in your setting to be, you might sprinkle a few in or chose to invent “parallel” idioms based on the history and cultures of your world. If you do chose to avoid “real” colloquialisms in your dialog be careful. There’s a lot of things that don’t immediately look like they’re directly rooted in Earth history or culture that turn out to be if you look closer. For example, “zounds” is an abbreviation of “Christ’s wounds,” a potentially sacrilegious exclamation common in medieval England.

Characters should also have a rhythm of speaking. Some might prefer short words or sentences, others are prone to stringing thoughts together. Any kind of verbal tic can be present in character dialog, although I recommend not writing any dialog in a way that is difficult to understand. Spelling out heavy regional accents, for example. I try to describe these in narration rather than write them out as someone not familiar with the accent might find it incomprehensible.

It is possible to give characters difficult or even impossible to understand dialog. Giving the incomprehensible speaker a translator can create comedy, subtext and intrigue in equal measure. The dialog might not be important, either. But in general, if you’re going to write it out on the page I recommend making it understandable. Having strings of gibberish written out on the page typically just frustrates me and I skim past it. Your mileage may vary.

How your characters communicate with each other, persuade one another or conceal their goals is a difficult thing to manage and probably one of the most important things for you, as an author, to work out. As such I don’t have as fixed a process for it as some other things. I do have a lot of rules of thumb, however, and I’ve gathered them together in large part by reading blogs like this one or books on the art of writing and, of course, reading lots of good stories myself. Hopefully something you find here will help you create compelling scenes as well.