Here’s a fact of life: People don’t always say exactly what they mean.
We might say “I’m fine,” when we really mean “I’m having a crappy day, but I don’t
want to burden you with that.”
We use euphemisms to soften the blow when we fire someone or break up with someone.
Communication often involves this kind of subtext, a term Gotham Writers defines as
“the meaning beneath the dialogue; what the speaker really means, even though he’s
not saying it directly.”
In fiction, not every conversation needs a second layer of meaning, but if you ever get
feedback that your dialogue feels unnatural or too on the nose, it likely relates to a
lack of subtext.
The remedy to this can be found in the words of Janet Burroway:
“…if you're aware as you're writing that both characters have their own desires and
conflicting emotions, if you allow them to reveal some of their feelings and hide others,
they will become authentic and believable.”
Now, let’s look at specific ways to create nuanced conversations between characters.
A contradiction between a character’s words and body language can provide a glimpse into
hidden thoughts.
A liar might say, “I dunno,” but the way she licks her dry lips suggests she knows
more than she’s letting on.
Flirting also entails nonverbal cues and dropping hints to see if another person reciprocates
our feelings.
We might stand a little closer or invite someone over to our house as a way of expressing
romantic interest.
We can see body language subtext in action in the historical drama Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell.
This scene features the story’s two main characters: the flirtatious Scarlett O’Hara
and the charming Rhett Butler.
Rhett has just given Scarlett a new bonnet as a gift.
Right before they exchange dialogue, there’s a passage describing Scarlett’s internal musings.
She notices Rhett staring at her lips, and she assumes he’s going to try and kiss her.
She debates about whether or not she wants him to, but ultimately decides she’ll allow
it because it would be exciting and entertaining for him to fall in love with her.
Here’s the dialogue that follows: But he made no move to kiss her.
She gave him a sidelong glance from under her lashes and murmured encouragingly.
“So you always get paid, do you?
And what do you expect to get from me?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Well, if you think I’ll marry you to pay for the bonnet, I won’t,” she said
daringly and gave her head a saucy flirt that set the plume to bobbing.
His white teeth gleamed under his little mustache.
“Madam, you flatter yourself.
I do not want to marry you or anyone else.
I am not a marrying man.”
“Indeed!” she cried, taken aback and now determined that he should take some liberty.
“I don’t even intend to kiss you, either.”
“Then why is your mouth all pursed up in that ridiculous way?”
“Oh!” she cried as she caught a glimpse of herself and saw that her red lips were
indeed in the proper pose for a kiss.
“Oh!” she cried again, losing her temper and stamping her foot.
“You are the horridest man I have ever seen and I don’t care if I never
lay eyes on you again!”
The subtext here for Scarlett is “Kiss me,” and she’s trying to trick Rhett into it,
but he sees through her charade and calls her out on her body language.
The subtext of his dialogue is “I know you’re trying to manipulate me.”
Scarlett’s last line is obviously overdramatic and untrue.
She’s frustrated about having been found out, so she says something she doesn’t actually mean.
Her words, her actions, and even her thoughts are at odds with one another.
Sometimes, seemingly trivial reactions can mask a deeper, secondary emotion.
A sister could refuse to let her brother borrow her car because she says he’ll wreck it,
but in reality, she’s mad because he wants to use it to take her best friend out on a date.
So, the character’s reaction to a smaller issue is actually about a larger problem.
F. Scott Fitzgerald achieves this type of subtext in The Great Gatsby, when Daisy visits
Gatsby’s mansion and sees his collection of expensive shirts:
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer
linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered
the table in many-colored disarray.
While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes
and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms
of Indian blue.
Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds.
“It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”
Daisy’s tears have more to do with her and Gatsby’s relationship than his clothes.
She’s lamenting lost love and opportunity.
She says, “They’re such beautiful shirts,” when she really means, “I’m heartbroken
because now that we can finally be together without any class barriers, we can’t, because
I’m already married.”
This scene shows up again and again in articles that discuss subtext—and the reason it’s
such a memorable moment is because there’s a second conversation hidden beneath
the surface-level dialogue.
Some people might sugarcoat the truth to play by the rules of social etiquette.
If your friend asks what you think of her mom, it’s more acceptable to say she’s
kind of “eccentric” or “unique” rather than “weird” or “crazy.”
We often skirt the truth to avoid hurting our loved one’s feelings, such as when we
ask our spouses if they liked our novel, and they say, “It was good!
I mean, great.”
Fiction writers can learn a lot about conveying subtext through words alone from stage plays.
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman provides a model for how characters beat around the bush.
The salesman is Willy, and in this scene, he’s trying to ask his young boss, Howard,
if he can stop traveling for work: WILLY: Well, tell you the truth, Howard.
I’ve come to the decision that I’d rather not travel anymore.
HOWARD: Not travel!
Well, what’ll you do?
WILLY: Remember, Christmas time, when you had the party here?
You said you’d try to think of some spot for me here in town.
HOWARD: With us?
WILLY: Well, sure.
HOWARD: Oh, yeah, yeah.
I remember.
Well, I couldn’t think of anything for you, Willy.
WILLY: I tell ya, Howard.
The kids are all grown up, y’know.
I don’t need much anymore.
If I could take home—well, sixty-five dollars a week, I could swing it.
HOWARD: Yeah, but Willy, see I— WILLY: I tell ya why.
Howard.
Speaking frankly and between the two of us, y’know—I’m just a little tired.
HOWARD: Oh, I could understand that, Willy.
But you’re a road man, Willy, and we do a road business.
We’ve only got a half-dozen salesmen on the floor here.
WILLY: God knows, Howard.
I never asked a favor of any man.
But I was with the firm when your father used to carry you in here in his arms.
HOWARD: I know that, Willy, but— WILLY: Your father came to me the day you
were born and asked me what I thought of the name of Howard, may he rest in peace.
HOWARD: I appreciate that, Willy, but there just is no spot here for you.
If I had a spot I’d slam you right in, but I just don’t have a single solitary spot.
The subtext of Willy’s dialogue is a desperate plea: “I want an office job, and you should
pity me because I’ve been here a long time and I knew your father.”
Howard’s replies, meanwhile, are all variations of “no,” with the implication that Willy
isn’t good enough of an employee for a non-traveling position.
The characters clash because they have conflicting motivations.
They interrupt, avoid giving direct answers, and overuse each other’s names in an attempt
at politeness, creating a strong subtext.
In interrogation scenes and arguments between lovers, it’s common to see implied accusations.
If a police officer asks you, “What were you doing last Saturday, huh?”, you can
be pretty sure they’re insinuating you were somehow involved in the crime.
This type of implied accusation is used in Harlan Coben’s thriller novel Tell No One.
The first-person narrator, Dr. David Beck, is taken in for questioning about his wife’s murder.
His interrogators are special agents Nick Carlson and Tom Stone.
Carlson and Stone exchanged a quick glance.
“The name Sarah Goodhart has surfaced in connection with an ongoing investigation,” Carlson said.
“What investigation?” I asked.
“We’d rather not say.”
“I don’t understand.
How am I connected into this?”
Carlson let loose a sigh, taking his time on the exhale.
He looked over at his rotund partner and suddenly all smiles were gone.
“Am I asking a complicated question here, Tom?”
“No, Nick, I don’t think so.”
“Me neither.”
Carlson turned his eyes back at me.
“Maybe you object to the form of the question, Doc.
That it?”
The literal version of the conversation might go:
“Stop lying.
You obviously know something about this case.”
The protagonist catches on to their accusatory attitude and tries to further evade their questions.
This leads to greater tension, as the reader wonders if the interrogators will arrest the
narrator as a suspect in his wife’s murder.
Most of us have been on the receiving end of passive aggressiveness or sarcasm.
A mother might guilt trip her rebellious teenager by saying, “Go ahead. Ignore me.
It’s not like I spent 12 hours in labor with you or anything.”
Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” drips with
passive-aggressive dialogue.
A couple sits outside a building at a train station in Spain, having drinks.
The elephant in the room is the fact that the girl is pregnant, and her lover wants
her to get an abortion during a time when it is very much illegal, and she’s not sure
what she wants to do —yet the word “abortion” is not used once in the story.
We can feel the crackling tension between the couple even when they’re making idle
conversation about the scenery: “They look like white elephants,” she said.
“I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer.
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
“I might have,” the man said.
“Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.”
They both seem to be overreacting to a simple comment, hinting at a deeper issue between them.
The girl’s frustration isn’t really about her lover failing to acknowledge her white
elephants comment but about a larger problem in their relationship: he no longer shows
affection toward her, now that she’s pregnant.
As their conversation goes on, we get the sense that she feels their relationship is
doomed, even if she does get an abortion: “But if I do it, then it will be nice again
if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?”
In real life, we rely on this type of subtext to broach difficult conversations.
Here, the white elephants are a vehicle the characters use to indirectly discuss their
relationship problems, without having to face the pain of confronting hard questions directly.
Hemingway is known for his minimalistic style, and you probably noticed that this story reads
more like a stage play or a screenplay.
His style adheres to his Iceberg Theory of writing, also known as the theory of omission.
He once stated: “If a writer of prose knows enough about
what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer
is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the
writer had stated them.
The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
Essentially, this means that sometimes less is more.
Hemingway gives his readers little context, allowing his dialogue to speak for itself,
putting the responsibility of dissecting its meaning into the reader’s hands.
Vague references to a “simple operation” enables the author to talk about a taboo subject
like abortion.
Similar types of euphemisms can be used for other touchy topics.
In any given scene, a character might hold back their true emotions to avoid hurting
another person, embarrassing themselves, showing vulnerability, or facing a hard truth.
We rely on subtext when we have something to lose, like our pride, safety, comfort,
or happiness.
However, we might misinterpret someone’s intentions and assume they’re angry at us
when they’re only frustrated at the situation.
We might mine for a subtext that doesn’t exist in asking our partners what they meant
when they said nothing was wrong.
We might miscommunicate our own feelings, making someone think we dislike them, when
in fact we’re just tired.
Sometimes, we’re unaware of our own feelings, yet others can still sense our true emotions
through the words we choose and our nonverbal cues.
That’s the beauty of subtext—it creates conflict, which makes for an engaging story.
When characters skirt around a tough conversation, it puts readers on the edge of their seats
with anticipation as they wait for the truth to bubble to the surface.
We itch to know how the exchange will play out and what consequences the characters will face.
During a first draft, it’s okay to have placeholders that state the characters’
direct meaning.
But when you go back to revise highly emotional scenes, try to have the characters convey
their thoughts without explicitly stating them.
Your readers will pick up on the subtext and be more engaged as a result—you’re giving
the audience a puzzle to solve and adding realism.
As a writing exercise, imagine a conversation between two characters.
Determine their initial relationship—are they a married couple, a boss and an employee,
a suspect and an interrogator?
Then, have them argue about something.
You can identify the literal feelings you want to convey first, before thinking about
how the character would actually present this information, given the social norms or their
relationship with the other character.
Imply those feelings through dialogue and actions.
For instance, a character’s literal meaning might be “I’m pissed off because you didn’t
let me buy a labradoodle, and you claim that owning a dog would be ‘too expensive,’
but you’re a hypocrite about spending money.”
In actual dialogue, that might be translated to “How much was that drone toy thing you
never use?
Two grand?
You’re always buying useless crap.”
Think about how the characters want to present themselves.
What reaction are they trying to evoke or avoid from the other person?
Is this conversation actually about something else they’re not openly discussing?
Let tension arise from miscommunication.
What are your favorite examples of subtext in dialogue?
I’d love to hear them in the comments.
Whatever you do, keep writing. <3