How I Write Dialogue That Sounds Real

What stayed with me after reading Lost Innocences: The Pact was the way people in it talk around the thing they are afraid to say. I noticed it early, in contemporary Havana, where three schoolboys sit together and try to speak their way around a fear they do not want to name. The university entrance examination is less than three weeks away and it will decide their futures, so they joke, they change the subject, they speak in circles, and then, in a quieter voice, they say the thing they have been avoiding. That hesitation felt true to me in a way that a clean confession never would, because frightened people rarely announce their fear in tidy sentences. They bargain with it, they ask a friend what he would do as if the question belonged to someone else, they agree too quickly and then add a condition, as if the condition could undo the agreement.

Pedro Martínez Pérez is the boy I listened to most closely. When he and his friends Rafael and Juan go to Eulogio, a spiritual practitioner who sells certainty to the desperate, they do not speak like villains in a film. They speak like students who have convinced themselves that a payment is a solution, and their sentences are short, practical, and full of small evasions. What moved me was how much those evasions carried. When Pedro pays his share with his mother's stolen jewelry, and Yadira, the housekeeper who served the family for eight years, takes the blame, the silence that follows is a kind of dialogue too. A mother asks a careful question, a son answers a different question, nobody raises a voice, and that restraint is what makes the room feel cold. I found myself listening for what was not said at that table, because everyone there knew something was wrong and no one would name it.

The dialogue that unsettled me most belongs to the Northstar Continuity Review, the foundation network behind Eulogio, which teaches the children it assists that gratitude is a debt, that help requires a name, and that protection means ownership. Its language is polite, generous, and administrative, and that politeness is the danger. A character who offers help in warm, reasonable sentences can do more damage than a character who shouts, because the listener has to decide whether to accept a gift that comes with a signature attached. Reading those scenes made me think about every offer I have accepted without reading the terms, and about how easy it is to say yes to kindness and how hard it is to say no once gratitude has been recorded.

Journalist Lucía Valdés speaks differently again. She follows the money and the paper, and her questions are precise, because precision is her protection. She does not argue with the people she interviews, she lets them finish, and then she asks the one question they hoped she would forget. Her patience felt like courage to me, in a story about a machine that classifies children, because at least one voice refuses to be filed away.

The line I have carried since finishing the book comes in Room 7, where Pedro is offered two answers by a machine and types a third, accepting responsibility for what he did while refusing responsibility for what the network did with it. It reads like a sixteen year old who has finally stopped bargaining with himself. It is not a speech, it is a boundary written in plain words, and it works because everything before it taught me how hard it is for Pedro to speak plainly at all. That is what the book left me thinking about, that dialogue sounds real not when it is beautiful on its own, but when you can hear the fear, the debt, and the silence it had to cross to get said.

Lost Innocences: The Pact is Part I of the Lost Innocence saga by Tony Haber-Matos, published by Oreate-Casa Santiago Press in seven languages. You can find it on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HHXVHXHS and at Walmart at https://www.walmart.com/ip/Inocencia-Perdida-El-Pacto-Paperback/20996368906. Find Tony Haber-Matos at https://tonyhabermatos.wordpress.com, on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-haber/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/tonyhaberofficial, and on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@tonyhabermatos. Tony Haber-Matos, Qvivo Brands Inc. and Casa Santiago LLC.

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