You’d think writers would have an ear for dialogue, but it amazes me how many don’t. Note that good dialogue need not be naturalistic, but its rhythms and twists inevitably have their roots in real speech, however far the writer has taken them in the service of character and story.

One of my favourite lines in the English language is from David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. It’s so simple, and it makes me smile every time I hear it. “Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.” Not, “Get them to sign on the dotted line,” you’ll note, the line that so many writers would have opted for, and which serves the same purpose, and even has a rhyme. No. “Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.” Get it yet? The rhythm, the rhyme, the eccentricity of the phrasing: it’s a sheer delight. Every now and then, I might find something in my own writing that approaches the same level of joy for me. Not, please, that I am comparing myself to Mamet, who can construct whole scripts from well disciplined syllables. But take, for instance, a line from A Ghost in the Garage, which you’ll find in the writing samples here on the site. I didn’t appreciate it until it was read out in a group, and people laughed, and I realised how ridiculous it sounds. The line? “In a manner, mon amour.” Say it out loud and you’ll get it. Repeat it a few times and it starts to take on the goofball quality of the Muppets’ song Manha-Manha.

Note in these instances it’s the sound of the words that’s the issue. The content is pretty much irrelevant. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if you don’t relish the glorious and absurd range of noises that the human mouth is capable of, then you’ve got no business being a writer.

I keep a notebook with me most of the time…more than one usually. But this particular one is to capture language as it emerges from peoples’ mouths and as it appears in the wild (ie, I don’t take anything from fictional sources, though I do have sections for technobabble, psychobabble, and adspeak). It’s something I’ve been doing for nearly three years, since doing a superb course called Captivating Communication with NLP trainer Michael Breen and performance poet Murray Lachlan Young (most known for the controversy around his piece Simply Everyone’s Taking Cocaine, which caused all kinds of fuss and led to Murray being given a record deal and dubbed the Million Pound Poet). We looked at how Murray came to create his pieces, which starts off with a process of collecting language in just that fashion. The phrases he comes across are then glued together, morphed, and generally played with until something resembling poetry comes out. Here’s the first piece I came up with using that method:

Monstering through meaning

A tyrannosaurus lex

Sparking up synapses

A self-perpetuating hex

A professional style blender

Here to queer the decks

A lyrical reminder

That language is sex

Want a go yourself? Here’s a starter pack with a few of the scraps of languages I’ve sampled, and may well use in some form one day, and which you can now play with too:

concrete evangelist

iconic fabric

label-conscious homage

ladder-climbing arselicker

I could see the temper in your knuckles

his heft was too much for the rattan chair, and it went kerplooey

disco trauma

truckstop wankfodder

a little bit anxious, a little bit wide-eyed, a little bit late for my train

coke-dealing wheel-clamper

chestnuts and acrobats