There’s an outfit — I won’t dignify or give them publicity by naming them — offering an online course in Advanced Dialogue, which will teach you 47 ways to make your dialogue sizzle and get Hollywood actors panting with excitment at the prospect of speaking your words. And I’m thinking ‘Advanced Dialogue? I don’t remember doing a class at any point on Advanced Talking’, which is presumably what such a hi-falutin’ concept calls for.

More to the point, which is more important: dialogue skills or listening skills? As far as I’m concerned, you have no business writing words to go into a fictional person’s mouth until you can demonstrate an ability to sift through actual conversations and remember what startled, saddened or otherwise affected you. The biggest tool you have for writing dialogue comes in a pair, one either side of your head.

Which isn’t to say that dialogue skills can’t be sharpened. But it starts off with that first hand experience, to which can then be added skills from the realm of linguistics. Nothing too technical, and some people have such an ear for speech that they don’t need that kind of knowledge. But I know that I’ve been assisted in my writing by knowing things like what a nominalisation is.

A what? OK, break it down. The first three letters — nom — will be familiar from the term nom de plume. They indicate name. The rest is a fancy way of saying something about the process of naming. In particular, the way that we capture a whole bunch of stuff that happened — a process, involving verbs — and put it into a noun. Like, for instance, the term ‘heist’. Which five simple letters mask what could have been weeks of reconnoissance work, planning, and the assembly of a team fit for the job at hand.

Knowing the word ‘heist’, we can use in in dialogue confident that the audience will fill in the blanks without us having to go into massive detail. Saves time, and allows the writer to paint with broad brushstrokes. We know that in Reservoir Dogs a heist has happened. Its details become apparent in the aftermath, which is what the story concentrates on.

Conversely, there are times when a nominalisation can be used to spring a surprise on the audience. Even now, when a character refers to being in a relationship, odds are most audience members will be thinking of a heterosexual one, especially since Hollywood is so homophobic about what roles actors play. The realisation that a character has a same sex partner counts as difference.

All of this, if you think about it, is to do with the pictures that audiences make in their heads based on the words that they hear. And you as writer are responsible for those words. As such, you have a certain degree of influence over the pictures too. Not total, because our internal imagery is personal, and your references and mine aren’t the same. But still, you do exercise a lot of control over how audiences think and feel.

All of which, by the way, doesn’t just apply to dialogue. Scene descriptions are just as important. Your job is to persuade the director that the way they want to film a scene is the way that you’ve implicitly described. And hopefully you’ve described it well. Either way, the director will get nearly all the credit for it, since they have more status. Get used to that, or start writing for radio or the theatre, where the writer is more respected — and less well paid.

Words have power. Bards way back when were feared because the power of sarcasm could ruin a man’s reputation. Politicians have speechwriters to work their contemporary magic — I still have no idea what George Bush the First was referring to when he talked about ‘a thousand points of light’, a phrase repeated in his speeches again and again when he was standing for office. But I do know that when people make mental images of lots of sparkly lights around them, it makes them feel good. And it’s by keeping curious about how language works when you come across it — in overheard conversations, in tv ads, in slam poetry and food labelling — that you begin to develop a feel for how this stuff works.