Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

That's a web video of Rachel Shukert's reading from her new memoir, Have You No Shame? 

As you can see, her work literally jumps off the page. We can learn a lot by watching her read, and finding out how her theater experience affects her writing.

Today Shukert explains how you can use spoken word to improve your dialogue, part of my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
Your dialogue jumps off the page, especially every time your parents speak. How did you get this knack for how people talk? On a practical level, how can we improve the way our characters talk?

Rachel Shukert:
Well, every author has a few things that they are good at, and I guess mine is dialogue.  (There are also many, many things I am bad at.) Continue reading...

It's always come fairly naturally to me--I tend to remember the eccentricities and tone of people's speech, and be able to reproduce it.  But a huge part of that is my background in theater--as an actor and a playwright, which is basically all dialogue, all the time. 

As a actor, you figure out very quickly the difference between bad dialogue and good--the kind that feels stilted and trite vs. dialogue that feels natural and believable, but still surprisingly.  I constantly read stuff out loud as well when I'm working--especially dialogue scenes; it's incredibly helpful to see if something flows the way a real conversation would or just kind of falls flat. 

Also, people in real life tend to be much smarter and better conversationalists than they are in books--have you ever noticed that?  It's important to make  your characters as smart as you are--or smarter--that's another old acting lesson I've kind of applied to writing. 

People say interesting, funny, off-the-wall things all the time.  Be a good listener, and then write down the things people say and steal them!