---
name: dialogue-writing
description: |
  Writes naturalistic, character-driven dialogue with subtext, distinct voices, and narrative purpose for fiction, screenplays, or creative projects.
  Use when the user asks to write dialogue, improve conversation in fiction, create character voices, or draft a dialogue-heavy scene.
  Do NOT use for screenplay format (use screenplay-scene), full scene writing beyond dialogue (use scene-writing), or character profiles (use character-development).
license: Apache-2.0
metadata:
  author: foundry-skills
  version: "1.0.0"
  tags: "creative-writing writing design"
  category: "writing"
  subcategory: "creative-writing"
  depends: ""
  disclaimer: "none"
  difficulty: "intermediate"
---
# Dialogue Writing

## When to Use

**Use this skill when:**
- The user asks to write a conversation, exchange, or dialogue scene between two or more characters in fiction, literary prose, stage plays, or creative non-fiction
- The user shares existing dialogue and asks why it feels flat, stiff, fake, or "on-the-nose" -- they want diagnosis and repair
- The user has distinct characters already developed and needs their voices to collide on the page for the first time
- The user is writing a scene where the emotional stakes are primarily carried through spoken language rather than action or interiority
- The user wants to introduce, deepen, or complicate a relationship dynamic through conversation -- revealing backstory, power, desire, or conflict without stating any of it directly
- The user asks for help with a specific dialogue craft challenge: subtext, interruption, dialect, silence, argument structure, or comedic timing
- The user is adapting a scene from one medium to another (novel to stage, for example) and needs the dialogue to carry more weight without action description

**Do NOT use this skill when:**
- The user needs full screenplay format with slug lines, parentheticals, action blocks, and transition cues -- use `screenplay-scene`
- The user wants a complete scene built around action, setting, and physical staging where dialogue is one element among several -- use `scene-writing`
- The user wants a speech, toast, eulogy, or prepared address delivered by one character to an audience -- use `personal-speech`
- The user needs to develop a character's background, psychology, and motivation before any scene is written -- use `character-development`
- The user wants to write interactive dialogue for games, branching narrative trees, or NPC conversation systems -- those formats require state logic and node architecture, not literary craft
- The user is writing non-fiction interview transcripts or journalistic reconstructed quotes -- different register, different ethics
- The user is writing commercial copy in dialogue form (ads, brand voice) -- that is persuasive writing, not character-driven fiction

---

## Process

### 1. Gather the Essential Dialogue Parameters

Before writing a single line, extract or ask for the following. Missing even one of these will produce generic dialogue.

- **Character identities and the gap between them:** Names matter less than the differential -- what does one character have or know that the other does not? This gap (of information, power, desire, age, class, history) is what makes every line mean more than it says. A conversation between two people who know the same things and want the same things is not a scene -- it is a meeting.
- **Surface objective (the want):** What does each character believe they are trying to accomplish in this conversation? They might be asking for money, demanding an apology, trying to leave a party. This is the declared agenda.
- **Hidden objective (the need):** What does each character actually want, underneath the surface? This is almost never the same as the surface objective. The character asking for money may actually be testing whether they are loved. The character demanding an apology may actually want permission to leave a relationship. Every compelling dialogue has at least one hidden objective, and the surface exchange is the characters' attempt to get the hidden thing without naming it.
- **What neither character will say:** The single most important variable. Identify the sentence that would end the scene immediately if either character said it out loud. That sentence is the black hole that everything else orbits.
- **Scene location and physical context:** A confrontation in a hospital waiting room plays differently than the same confrontation in a moving car. Physical constraints (who can leave, what they must do with their hands, who can see them) directly shape dialogue rhythm and interruption patterns.
- **Emotional starting temperature and arc:** Does the scene begin cold (subdued, guarded) and heat up? Or begin hot (already mid-argument) and cool? Or stay at one register throughout with sudden spikes? Map this arc before writing.
- **Relationship history:** How long have these characters known each other, what happened last time they spoke, and what is the unfinished business that precedes this moment? Even one or two lines of backstory unlocks specificity.

### 2. Identify the Conversation Architecture

Dialogue is not an improvised exchange -- it has a structure. Map the following before drafting:

- **The initiating pressure:** Something happened before this conversation that made it necessary now. A character received news, crossed a threshold, was pushed to a limit, made a decision. Scenes that begin without initiating pressure drift. Name the pressure explicitly.
- **The opening gambit:** Does the initiating character approach directly (confrontational) or sideways (avoidant)? The gambit reveals character immediately. A character who begins with "We need to talk about what happened" is different from one who begins with "Have you eaten? There's soup."
- **The sequence of moves:** Dialogue is transactional -- each line is an action (attack, deflect, offer, retreat, test, conceal, demand, surrender). Map the primary move of each beat before writing it. This prevents aimless exchanges. Five to eight moves is enough for a short scene; twelve to fifteen for a longer one.
- **The turn:** Every dialogue scene must have a pivot point -- a moment when the trajectory changes because new information enters, a mask drops, a lie is told, a vulnerability surfaces, or a line is crossed. Locate the turn before writing. It is usually about two-thirds of the way through the exchange.
- **The silence or evasion:** Plan at least one moment where a character does not answer the question asked, or answers a different question, or says nothing. This is where the reader feels the most. Silence in dialogue is not the absence of content -- it is the highest-density moment in the exchange.
- **The exit:** How does the scene end? Resolved (both characters changed), unresolved (the core issue still unspoken), interrupted (external force stops the exchange), or trailing off (the conversation dies from exhaustion or evasion)? The exit determines the scene's emotional aftertaste.

### 3. Assign Voice Architecture to Each Character

Before writing the dialogue, define the speech signature of each character. A speech signature is not an accent or an affectation -- it is a set of consistent tendencies that reflect psychology and history.

- **Vocabulary register:** Does this character speak in monosyllables or polysyllables? Do they reach for clinical language, slang, technical terms, biblical cadence, corporate jargon? The vocabulary they default to is the vocabulary of their formation.
- **Sentence structure:** Long, subordinate-clause-heavy sentences signal someone who qualifies, hedges, and thinks while talking. Short declarative sentences signal someone who has already decided. Fragments signal someone under stress or someone who thinks faster than they speak.
- **What they avoid:** Every character has linguistic avoidance -- topics, words, grammatical constructions they will not use. A character who never uses the word "I" is dissociating. A character who never says "I don't know" is performing certainty. Map one or two avoidances per character.
- **Verbal tics and fillers:** Not for comedy unless warranted -- but real speech contains repetition, self-correction, re-starts. "The thing is" before every complaint. "I mean" when uncertain. "Right?" seeking validation. These should be used sparingly but precisely: once or twice marks a pattern; three times is a tic.
- **What they do with silence and pause:** Some characters fill silence compulsively (they fear it). Some characters weaponize it (they use it to control). Some characters are simply comfortable in it (a marker of security or age). How a character treats silence reveals their relationship to power.
- **Lies and evasions:** How does this character lie? Do they over-explain, go quiet, change the subject, answer a slightly different question, offer partial truths? Liars in dialogue are rarely dramatic -- they are usually very specific about minor details while being vague about major ones.

### 4. Draft the Dialogue -- First Pass

Write the full exchange without stopping to revise. Follow these drafting principles:

- **Write long first:** Let characters say too much. It is easier to cut than to add. Restraint is an editing discipline, not a drafting one.
- **Read aloud as you draft:** If you cannot say a line without stumbling, the character cannot say it either. Dialogue that sounds literary on the page often fails the breath test -- lines that are too long for a single breath, or too formal for a human mouth.
- **Let characters surprise you:** If a character does something unexpected -- deflects where you expected confrontation, confesses where you expected denial -- follow it. The architecture you mapped is a foundation, not a cage.
- **Use action beats as punctuation:** A beat (a brief physical action between lines) controls pace and breath. A character picking up a glass, looking out a window, or sitting down inserts a half-second of silence. Beats placed before a key line give it weight. Beats placed after it let it land. Never cluster more than two beats in a row -- the scene stops moving.
- **Tag discipline:** Use "said" as the default attribution. It is functionally invisible to a reader. Use "asked" for questions. Use a different tag (whispered, called, cut in) only when the delivery fundamentally alters meaning, and only when the dialogue itself cannot convey it. Never use a tag as an emotion label -- "she said bitterly" means the dialogue failed to convey bitterness.
- **Interruptions and overlaps:** Real conversation interrupts constantly. Signal interruptions with an em dash at the end of the interrupted line. Signal trailing off or unfinished thought with an ellipsis. Use both sparingly but do not avoid them -- a dialogue with zero interruptions is a tennis match, not a conversation.
- **Non-answers:** At least once in the exchange, a character should not answer the question they were asked. They should answer a nearby question, or pivot to an accusation, or respond to the emotion behind the question rather than its content.

### 5. Apply the Five Diagnostic Tests

After completing the first draft, run these five tests in order before doing any other revision:

- **Interchangeability test:** Cover the dialogue tags. Read each line aloud. Can you tell who is speaking from vocabulary, rhythm, and syntax alone? If any two lines could belong to either character, the voices are not distinct. Identify the swappable lines and rewrite them to be unmistakably one person.
- **On-the-nose test:** Scan for any line where a character directly states their emotion, intention, or judgment. "I feel abandoned." "You always do this." "I'm angry because you lied." These are on-the-nose. Real people protect themselves by expressing emotion obliquely. Rewrite by asking: what does this character say instead of what they mean? Usually it is something domestic, deflective, or apparently unrelated.
- **Exposition dump test:** Look for any stretch where a character explains the situation, the history, or the stakes in a way that serves the reader but not the scene. Both characters knowing something does not justify one explaining it to the other. If exposition is necessary, route it through conflict (characters disagree about the facts), ignorance (one character genuinely does not know), or revelation (the information is news to at least one person in the room).
- **Rhythm test:** Count the words in ten consecutive lines. If more than half are within five words of each other, the rhythm is too uniform. Real dialogue contains lines that are one word and lines that are forty words. Vary deliberately. Short lines after long ones land like a punch. Long lines after short ones feel like an outburst.
- **Stalling test:** Find any stretch of five or more consecutive exchanges where nothing changes -- no new information enters, no power shifts, no emotional temperature rises or falls. This is stalling. Cut the section to its two most essential exchanges, or introduce a new element (a physical intrusion, an unexpected confession, a topic change).

### 6. Layer in Subtext -- the Second Pass

Subtext is not decoration -- it is the structural feature that makes dialogue worth reading. After the first draft, do a dedicated subtext pass:

- **The iceberg principle:** The surface meaning of the dialogue is the ten percent above water. What is the ninety percent below? For every major exchange in the scene, identify what is NOT being said and confirm that its absence is felt. If the unsaid thing is not felt, the scene has no subtext -- only text.
- **Double-register lines:** The most effective subtext lines work on two levels simultaneously. A character saying "You should eat something" might mean "I forgive you" or "I am terrified and this is all I can do." Identify one or two lines per scene where the surface meaning and the deep meaning diverge, and polish those lines until both registers are clear.
- **Misdirection:** Characters use language to look away from what matters. A character under emotional pressure will often start talking about logistics, objects, or third parties. This misdirection IS the emotion -- the reader understands that the character who cannot stop talking about travel logistics is actually talking about whether to stay in a marriage.
- **The strategic pause before the truth:** When a character is about to say something true, something important, or something they cannot take back, they often delay with a filler, a non-sequitur, or a physical action. Build this hesitation into the text.

### 7. Polish for Rhythm, Specificity, and Restraint

The final pass is about precision and removal:

- **Replace generic nouns with specific ones:** "the car" becomes "the Volvo." "A song" becomes "that one you always played on Sundays." Specificity is the opposite of exposition -- it suggests rather than explains, and it locates the character in a particular life rather than a generic situation.
- **Cut the last line:** In most dialogue scenes, the final exchange is one line too long. The scene says what it needs to say and then says it again slightly differently. Cut the restatement. End earlier than feels comfortable.
- **Remove all redundant tags and beats:** After all revisions, re-examine every tag and every beat. Remove any that serve no rhythmic or informational purpose. A scene with forty lines may need only eight to twelve attributions, placed at the moments of greatest ambiguity.
- **Stress test the ending:** Read the last three exchanges aloud. The final line should feel inevitable in retrospect and slightly surprising in the moment. If it feels like a conclusion (a summary of what just happened), it is too explained. If it feels like an escape (the writer didn't know how to end it), it is too vague. It should feel like a door closing -- the scene is over, but the characters continue.

---

## Output Format

```
## Dialogue: [Scene Title]

**Characters:**
- [Character 1]: [Age or approximate age] -- [Role in the relationship, key psychological trait, what they want from this scene]
- [Character 2]: [Age or approximate age] -- [Role in the relationship, key psychological trait, what they want from this scene]

**Scene Context:** [Location, time, and the initiating pressure that made this conversation necessary now]

**Surface Topic:** [What the characters appear to be talking about]

**Actual Subtext:** [What the conversation is really about, and what neither character will say directly]

**Voice Architecture:**
- [Character 1]: [Sentence structure tendency, vocabulary register, verbal avoidance, how they handle silence]
- [Character 2]: [Sentence structure tendency, vocabulary register, verbal avoidance, how they handle silence]

---

[Character 1 name]

[Dialogue line]

[Character 2 name]

[Dialogue line, possibly with a brief action beat in brackets or italics between lines]

[Continue exchange -- vary line length, include at least one non-answer, one interruption, and one double-register line]

---

### Dialogue Notes

| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| **Initiating pressure** | [What happened before the scene that made it necessary] |
| **Surface objective -- [Character 1]** | [What they say they want] |
| **Hidden objective -- [Character 1]** | [What they actually want] |
| **Surface objective -- [Character 2]** | [What they say they want] |
| **Hidden objective -- [Character 2]** | [What they actually want] |
| **The turn** | [The line or exchange where the scene pivots, and what changes] |
| **Key subtext moment** | [The specific line that means more than it says, and what it means] |
| **What neither character says** | [The sentence that would end the scene if spoken aloud] |
| **Power map** | [Who has the upper hand at the start, whether it shifts, and how] |
| **Voice contrast** | [What makes each character's speech immediately distinguishable] |
| **Exit type** | [Resolved / Unresolved / Interrupted / Trailing -- and why this exit fits the story's needs] |
```

---

## Rules

1. NEVER write exposition through characters explaining things both of them already know. The "As you know, Bob" construction -- where one character tells another character the established facts of their shared situation -- is the single most common dialogue failure in amateur fiction. If information must reach the reader, route it through genuine ignorance, active disagreement, or the charged moment of revelation.

2. NEVER use a dialogue tag as an emotion label. "She said bitterly," "he snapped angrily," "she exclaimed joyfully" -- these constructions mean the dialogue itself failed to convey the emotion. The tag is compensating for a weak line. Fix the line, not the tag. The only exception: when the delivery genuinely contradicts the content (irony, sarcasm), a tag can signal the inversion.

3. NEVER write a scene where two characters agree on everything. Even deep allies have friction -- different priorities, different information, different fears. Agreement without friction is not drama. If the user asks for a warm or supportive scene, the friction can be gentle (a misunderstanding, a difference of tone), but it must exist. Two characters who simply validate each other have nothing to reveal.

4. NEVER give two characters the same sentence structure. Vary the syntax deliberately and systematically. One character speaks in fragments; the other in compound sentences. One uses questions to avoid statements; the other never asks questions. The reader should feel the difference before they identify it consciously.

5. NEVER write a dialogue turn that is not earned. A sudden confession, reversal, or emotional breakthrough must be set up by at least two earlier exchanges that create the pressure for it. If the turn comes without preparation, it reads as a writing convenience, not a human moment.

6. ALWAYS know what neither character will say before writing the first line. This is the structural skeleton of the scene. Every line of dialogue is shaped by what cannot be said -- characters circle it, approach it, retreat from it. If you do not know what the forbidden sentence is, the dialogue will lack gravitational pull.

7. ALWAYS vary line length with intention. A three-word line after a forty-word line is a full stop. A forty-word line after a three-word line is an eruption. Use this contrast to control where the reader's attention peaks. Dialogue written in uniform lengths has no rhythm -- it reads like a transcription of two machines.

8. ALWAYS put the most important content at the end of a line, not the beginning. "You were right" lands differently than "I was wrong, I see that now, I think you were right." In the second version the payload is buried. Move the emotional or informational core to the last clause whenever possible.

9. NEVER resolve the scene's central tension in the final line. The subject of the conversation can close; the emotional truth rarely does. A scene that ties itself off too neatly robs the characters of their ongoing interior lives. The best final lines introduce a small new complication, return to an image from the opening in a changed register, or end on an action rather than a word.

10. NEVER mistake quantity of dialogue for depth. A long exchange can have no subtext; three lines can contain a complete emotional arc. When trimming, keep what reveals and remove what explains. Explanation is the enemy of subtext. If a line could be cut without the reader losing any understanding of character, relationship, or situation, cut it.

11. ALWAYS track who has the information advantage at each moment. Dialogue is fundamentally a game of information asymmetry -- who knows what the other does not? This asymmetry creates tension even when characters are not in overt conflict. When one character learns something the other has been concealing, that is the turn. Map the information state of each character beat by beat.

12. NEVER use phonetic spelling to indicate dialect or accent. "Gonna," "ya," "wanna" -- these are standard informal written speech and acceptable. But writing "wuz" for "was," "dem" for "them," or phonetically transcribing a regional accent is at best clumsy, at worst condescending. Convey linguistic difference through word order, idiom, formality level, and the cultural assumptions embedded in what a character considers worth saying.

---

## Edge Cases

### User Wants to Deliver Necessary Exposition Through Dialogue

This is the most common craft request: the story needs the reader to know something, and the writer has two characters who both know it. Solutions:

- Route exposition through a character who genuinely does not know -- but be careful that the ignorant character's not-knowing reveals something about them (they have been absent, they are young, they have been protected, they chose not to find out).
- Stage the exposition as a dispute about the facts. Two characters who disagree about what happened will cover the same expository ground while generating conflict. The reader absorbs the information in the friction.
- Reveal through omission: a character refusing to discuss something can establish facts as effectively as one explaining them. "We don't talk about that" tells the reader something happened, something significant, and that the people in this room have decided it is beyond language. That is far more compelling than "The thing that happened was..."
- If exposition is unavoidable, at minimum give the explaining character a motive for explaining that is not just serving the reader. They explain to justify themselves, to wound, to perform authority, to prove they were right.

### User Provides Dialogue That Is Uniformly On-the-Nose

When a user shares existing dialogue where characters say exactly what they feel ("I'm so angry with you," "I just wish you'd listened to me," "You never cared about us"), the repair process is:

1. Identify the underlying emotion the line is expressing.
2. Ask: what would this character say or do instead of naming this emotion, if they were unwilling or unable to name it?
3. Common substitutions: domestic detail (talking about objects, schedules, logistics instead of feelings), deflection to a third party ("Your father would have..."), precision complaint (attacking a small specific grievance instead of the large general one), or silent action followed by a line about something apparently unrelated.
4. The result should feel slightly oblique -- the reader understands the emotion, but the character has not named it. This obliqueness is what earns the reader's engagement.

### User Wants a Monologue or Single-Character Speech Within Fiction

A monologue is not an exception to dialogue rules -- it is dialogue with an absent or imagined interlocutor. Handle it as follows:

- Identify the invisible audience. Who is this character addressing, consciously or unconsciously? A confession addressed to a dead parent is different from one addressed to a version of themselves.
- Map the imagined objections. The character is responding to something -- accusations, doubts, memories, the anticipated reactions of the absent listener. These imagined objections shape every turn in the monologue.
- Build in contradiction and revision. A character who monologues without contradicting themselves is delivering a speech. Real interior monologue argues with itself, catches itself in lies, revises its own account.
- Every fifty to sixty words, the character should shift -- in tone, in subject, in what they are willing to admit. A monologue with no internal pivots is a lecture.
- Avoid the trap of summary. The character must not explain what they feel -- they must demonstrate it through what they choose to say and what they cannot bring themselves to say.

### User Wants Comedic Dialogue

Comedy in dialogue is built on four structural principles, not on jokes:

- **Incongruity of register:** A character responding to catastrophe in the vocabulary of mild inconvenience. "The house has been condemned." "I'll need to move the recycling."
- **The wrong specificity:** A character who, under emotional pressure, fixates on a precise, irrelevant detail. It is funnier to argue about the exact number of minutes someone was late than about the lateness itself.
- **Deflated expectation:** The reader (and one character) anticipates an emotional response that does not come. The comedy is in the refusal to give what the scene seems to demand.
- **Escalating misunderstanding:** Two characters talking about the same subject using the same words but with entirely different referents -- the comedy comes from how long this can be sustained before it collapses.

Never write a joke that a different character could have made. If you can transfer the comedic line to another character without it becoming less funny, the line is not grounded in voice.

### User Wants a Large Group Scene (Four or More Characters)

Group dialogue creates the specific problem of tracking. Solutions:

- Designate two primary speakers and treat all others as reactive. The primary speakers carry the scene's conflict; the others register it through interjections, body language, and the occasional well-timed one-liner.
- Give each secondary character one distinct feature: a character who keeps trying to de-escalate, a character who takes every statement literally, a character who says the thing everyone is thinking but nobody will say.
- Track silence as a resource. A character who says nothing for eight exchanges, then speaks one sentence, carries enormous weight. The silence must be motivated -- they are waiting, they are afraid, they are calculating -- and the break of silence should coincide with the scene's turn.
- Avoid the error of equal distribution: real group conversations do not give every participant equal airtime. Give the reader the power hierarchy through who controls the floor.
- Use spatial action to keep secondary characters present even when not speaking. Brief notations of what they are doing (refilling a glass, not looking up, moving to the window) maintain their existence in the scene without dialogue.

### User Wants Dialogue Between Characters Across a Power Imbalance (Boss / Employee, Parent / Child, Captor / Captive)

Power imbalance dialogue requires specific techniques:

- The subordinate character speaks in more hedged, qualified language. More questions, more deference markers, more checking for reaction. This is not weakness -- it is tactical intelligence.
- The power asymmetry does not prevent the subordinate from having the more important information. Scenes where the less powerful character holds the key fact -- and must decide whether and how to deploy it -- are the most tension-dense.
- A subordinate who speaks too directly, too early, breaks the plausibility of the power structure unless the scene is about that transgression.
- The powerful character is often the less interesting one to inhabit. Their power lets them be direct, demand, dismiss. Give them a private anxiety or a moment of unexpected vulnerability to avoid the flattening effect of uncontested power.
- The most compelling moment in power-imbalance dialogue is the instant when the subordinate realizes the powerful character needs something from them. This inversion of the power map -- even briefly -- is the structural engine of such scenes.

### User Wants a Reconciliation or Emotionally Positive Scene

Writers often struggle to write warmth or reconciliation without the scene becoming saccharine. Techniques:

- Let the warmth be asymmetrical. One character arrives at forgiveness before the other. The lag between one character's offering and the other's acceptance creates genuine tenderness rather than mutual congratulation.
- Give the positive emotional movement a cost. What does each character have to give up to reach this moment? Acknowledgment of fault, abandonment of a long-held position, admission of need -- all of these carry weight that makes the reconciliation feel earned.
- Specificity over declaration. "I've missed you" is weak. "I kept almost calling you when the Hendersons moved" contains a specific time, a specific impulse, and a specific restraint -- and it reveals far more about how much the character missed the other.
- End the scene before the warmth is fully resolved. Leave it one beat short of the hug, the explicit forgiveness, the clear statement of love. Let the reader complete the emotional arc. A scene that takes you all the way to the conclusion robs the reader of participation.

---

## Example

**Input:** "Write a scene where a junior architect named Selin is meeting with her firm's senior partner, David, to discuss a structural issue she found in a building design. She's worried it's a real problem; he's been dismissive in the past. She also knows he designed this building himself thirty years ago and it's considered his masterwork. I want real tension, not just professional disagreement."

**Output:**

## Dialogue: Load-Bearing

**Characters:**
- Selin: 29 -- Junior associate at Meridian Architecture, structural specialist, methodical and precise. In this scene: she wants David to take the calculation seriously; she actually wants to know whether she can trust her own judgment in this firm.
- David: 64 -- Senior founding partner, designed the Cassel Tower in 1992, which won the firm's most significant award and is still cited in his biography. In this scene: he wants to end this meeting quickly; he actually wants the problem not to exist.

**Scene Context:** David's office, Thursday afternoon. Selin requested the meeting three days ago; David rescheduled twice. She has brought printed calculations. The Cassel Tower is currently undergoing an interior renovation for its new tenant, which means the structure is partially exposed -- and which is why she saw it at all.

**Surface Topic:** Whether a load-bearing calculation in the original Cassel Tower design contains a safety margin shortfall under current code.

**Actual Subtext:** Whether Selin's professional instincts will be legitimized or erased, and whether David is capable of hearing that the thing he is most proud of may be wrong.

**What neither character will say:** David: "You might be right and I cannot afford for you to be." Selin: "I need to know if this firm is somewhere I can actually work."

**Voice Architecture:**
- Selin: Short declarative sentences when direct, longer qualifications when managing David's ego. Uses technical vocabulary as a signal of authority. Rarely asks rhetorical questions -- when she asks, she wants an answer. Avoids "I think" -- she says "the calculation shows," "the margin falls."
- David: Long sentences with subordinate clauses, often deferring conclusion until the end of a thought. Reaches for historical context as a form of argument. Uses the word "we" when he means "I." Goes quiet when threatened, then pivots to a compliment as a redirect.

---

Selin set the printout on the edge of his desk. Not all the way across -- she left it at the corner where he would have to reach for it.

"The third-floor transfer beam," she said. "The dead load calculation uses a nineteen ninety-two live load table. Under current code the safety margin is four point two percent below threshold."

David did not reach for the printout. "The building has been standing for thirty-two years."

"The building had a different use category for thirty-two years. The renovation changes the occupancy classification."

"We designed for the site conditions, not for a code table that didn't exist yet."

"I understand that." She moved the printout one inch closer to him. "The question is whether we flag it before the renovation closes up access, or after."

He picked up his pen. Set it down. "Who else has seen this?"

"Marcus saw the first draft. I ran the numbers twice before I came to you."

"Marcus."

"He said the same thing you're going to say."

David looked at her for the first time since she'd sat down. "What am I going to say?"

"That the building has been standing for thirty-two years."

He almost smiled. Almost. "It has."

"I know." She did not soften it. "That's not the same as it being fine."

He finally picked up the printout. She watched him read it the way she'd watched students read a failing grade -- looking for the error in the paper, not in themselves.

"The table you're using," he said. "The 2019 revision."

"It's current code."

"For new construction."

"For any structure undergoing material alteration." She had the section number ready; she did not say it. She waited to see if he would ask.

He did not ask.

"There are six comparable structures from that decade," he said. "All of them designed under the same tables. Nobody has flagged any of them."

"I've only looked at this one."

The room was quiet for a moment. Outside his window, the Cassel Tower was visible -- the narrow vertical band of it between the two newer buildings that had grown up around it. She had noticed this the first time she came to this office. She wondered if he still saw it, or if it had gone the way of wallpaper.

"It's a good building, Selin."

"Yes," she said. "It is."

"What you're describing would require a structural intervention during an active renovation."

"I know what it would require."

"The cost would be--"

"I didn't calculate the cost." She picked up her copy of the printout. "That's not what I do."

He set his copy down. Aligned it with the edge of his desk. "I'll have Hendricks take a look."

She stood. "Hendricks worked on the original project."

"He's the most qualified person in this firm for this kind of review."

"I'm sure he is." She picked up her bag. "I just wanted to make sure you had seen it. Formally. With the date."

He looked up at that.

She left the printout on his desk.

---

### Dialogue Notes

| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| **Initiating pressure** | The renovation has exposed the structure, giving Selin direct access to evidence she would otherwise not have had. The window is closing as construction progresses. |
| **Surface objective -- Selin** | Get David to formally acknowledge the calculation shortfall |
| **Hidden objective -- Selin** | Find out whether her judgment is safe in this firm, and protect herself professionally if it is not |
| **Surface objective -- David** | Assess the claim and redirect it to someone else |
| **Hidden objective -- David** | Make the problem someone else's before it becomes a matter of record attached to his name |
| **The turn** | "I just wanted to make sure you had seen it. Formally. With the date." -- Selin reveals that this meeting was never about persuasion. She came for documentation, not agreement. David understands that she has already protected herself. |
| **Key subtext moment** | "I didn't calculate the cost. That's not what I do." -- On the surface, a statement of role boundaries. Underneath: a refusal to carry his burden, and a signal that she is not going to be recruited into minimizing the problem. |
| **What neither character says** | David never says "you might be right." Selin never says "I don't trust this firm to handle this correctly." Both statements are present in every exchange. |
| **Power map** | David holds structural authority at the start. The shift occurs when Selin leaves the printout -- she has stopped seeking permission and started creating a record. The last word belongs to the object on his desk, not either of them. |
| **Voice contrast** | David reaches for historical argument and deferral; Selin speaks in present-tense fact. He says "we" about his own design; she never uses "we." He names costs; she refuses the category entirely. |
| **Exit type** | Unresolved -- the central question (will the problem be properly addressed) is unanswered, and both characters understand that the subtext fight was the real one. The printout on the desk is the scene's final image: the thing that cannot now be unseen. |
