The cursor blinks. A patient, rhythmic pulse against the sterile white of the screen. He leans in, the blue light of the monitor painting a ghost on his face, and types the line again. For the twelfth time.

‘Amanda, the board will never approve a maneuver so… audacious.’

“

He reads it aloud. The words feel like gravel in his mouth. Audacious? Who says audacious? Maybe a 19th-century railroad baron. Not a 32-year-old CFO from Cleveland. He deletes it. Tries again. ‘That’s too risky.’ Better, but it’s a placeholder. A beige, flavourless sentence that does a job and nothing more. It communicates information, but it doesn’t reveal a soul. The frustration isn’t just a mental block; it’s a physical sensation, a tightening in the chest, the same feeling you get when you try to fit the wrong key into a lock. It almost fits. It looks right. But it will not turn.

We’ve all been told the great lie: ‘Write what you know.’ It’s good advice, as far as it goes. It keeps us from writing about deep-sea welding if we’ve never been off dry land. But it misses the most critical element of creating anything that feels human. The secret isn’t to write what you know. It’s to write what you hear.

Our heads are full of what we think people sound like. This internal dialogue is curated, polished, and edited by our own biases and narrative desires. We think in story arcs. We think in clean, declarative sentences. Real people don’t. Real people talk in fragments. They circle a topic like a nervous bird. They interrupt themselves. They use filler words not as signs of weakness, but as tools to hold the floor while their brain catches up. Their grammar is a beautiful, chaotic mess. Truth isn’t in the perfect sentence; it’s in the hesitation before it.

I used to be obsessed with efficiency in language. Say what you mean, use the fewest words, get to the point. I see now that was a profound mistake. It’s a great way to write an instruction manual, a terrible way to write a human being. It’s the difference between two products on a shelf that look identical from 12 feet away. One costs $42, the other $272. The difference isn’t in the overall shape, it’s in the thousand tiny, invisible details-the quality of the stitching, the grade of the material, the subtle engineering that makes one feel right in your hand. The expensive, valuable version is in the specifics. The same is true for dialogue.

I once spent an afternoon with a man named Daniel A.-M., a playground safety inspector. I thought I knew what that job was. You go around, you kick a tire swing, you make sure the bolts are tight. I was wrong. For 2 hours, Daniel talked, and I just listened. He never once said he was passionate about his job. He didn’t need to. He talked about the ‘critical fall height’ of a particular slide, and the ‘head and neck entrapment zones’ on a jungle gym. He spoke with the quiet reverence of a museum curator. He explained that wood chips weren’t just wood chips; they were ‘engineered wood fiber,’ and there was a whole science to their ‘attenuation properties’ that could be the difference between a scraped knee and a catastrophic injury.

“You get a kid’s torso through there,” he said, not with anger, but with a weary sadness, “their head gets stuck. It’s a noose.”

“

He paused, looked out at the swings, and just shook his head. He didn’t say, ‘The bureaucracy is a nightmare’ or ‘I have to make tough choices.’ He just told me the story. The emotion wasn’t in an adjective; it was in the silence between his sentences.

If I were to write Daniel from ‘what I know,’ I’d make him a cliché. The grizzled civil servant, the rule-follower. But writing what I heard allows for something far more real. It allows for the poetry in his jargon, the love hidden in his technical precision. It allows for the contradiction of a man who spends his days mitigating risk with cold calculations so that children can experience joyful, reckless freedom. Nobody would ever say, “I am a complex man whose technical obsession masks a deep-seated desire to protect childhood innocence.” But they might spend ten minutes explaining the exact tensile strength required for a swingset chain. The meaning is the same.

Become an Anthropologist of the Everyday

This is where the real work begins. You have to become an anthropologist of the everyday. The coffee shop, the bus, the line at the grocery store-these are your classrooms. Don’t listen for plot. Listen for rhythm. Listen for the strange little detours a story takes. Listen to how a couple argues about dishwasher loading not by yelling, but by speaking with a terrifying, weaponized politeness. Listen to how a child explains the rules of a game they just invented, a masterpiece of looping logic and sudden, arbitrary changes. This is the raw material. It’s messy and often boring. But gold is always found mixed in with a lot of dirt.

But just capturing it isn’t enough. I used to believe that the goal was perfect, raw transcription. A one-to-one copy of reality. I filled notebooks, then audio recorders, with verbiage. But raw data is just noise. The art isn’t in the recording; it’s in the curation. It’s about listening to 42 minutes of conversation to find the 2 crucial minutes that reveal character. This is where modern tools have changed the game for creators. Imagine making a short documentary on Daniel. You have his entire two-hour interview. The old method was an agonizing process of listening, pausing, typing, rewinding. The modern workflow is to use a service to handle the initial grunt work, to gerar legenda em video the entire conversation automatically. This frees you from being a stenographer and allows you to be an artist. You can scan the text, see the patterns, find the moments where his voice cracked or where he repeated a phrase. The technology provides the raw text, but you provide the insight. You find the soul in the syntax.

This process-this act of deep, focused listening-does more than improve your dialogue. It changes you. It forces you to slow down. It cultivates a radical empathy, because you start to understand that everyone has their own jargon, their own private language for their passions and fears. The world stops being a backdrop for your own story and becomes an endless symphony of other stories, all playing at once.

There’s a reason we cringe at our own bad dialogue. It’s not just that it’s unrealistic; it’s that it feels like a lie. A small one, but a lie nonetheless. It’s the uncanny valley of human interaction. And the only way out of that valley is to stop inventing and start listening. Stop trying to make your characters sound clever, or noble, or profound. Let them sound… human. Let them be gloriously inefficient. Let them stumble, and pause, and contradict themselves. Let them talk about the attenuation properties of wood chips. Because somewhere in that beautiful, authentic mess, you’ll find a truth so sharp and clear it will take your breath away. You won’t have to announce it. You won’t have to explain it. You just have to get out of the way and let it be heard.