How I Learned to Write Dialogue by Listening to Trains

I began listening to trains long before I thought of myself as a writer. On suburban platforms in Melbourne, I heard doors chime, brakes hiss and station announcements flatten every accent into a public-service voice. Passengers answered in fragments: a question about a missing button, a name called twice, an apology compressed into “sorry, mate”. The platform taught me that conversation has weather. It changes with delay, distance, embarrassment and the number of people waiting for the same door.

Years of note-taking, interviews and long rail journeys turned that weather into a working method. I learned to hear the beat beneath a sentence, the meaning held inside a pause and the quiet pressure of what nobody says directly. That method later served my journalism, my novel Gideon’s Children and the observations gathered in An Irish Experience. A carriage could not supply whole characters, but it could show me how believable people interrupt, evade, soften a refusal and keep speaking while their feelings move elsewhere.

The Platform Became a Classroom

My earliest train lessons came on Melbourne’s suburban network, where the walk from platform to train exposed me to the day’s small frictions before the carriage doors opened. A parent carrying a school bag negotiated space with a suitcase. Two football players argued about a tackle in lowered voices. At Southern Cross, an announcement competed with luggage wheels and echoing footfalls. None of it looked like a scene, yet each exchange contained cause, tactic and consequence.

Station speakers made every arrival ceremonial. “Doors closing” carried information, but it also established a deadline that rearranged bodies and priorities. At Richmond, where people crossed between platforms, a warning could turn a conversation into a series of hurried half-sentences. On wet days, umbrellas dripped into small pools while strangers negotiated who would move first. On an early service, silence won. Nobody wanted to be the person who delayed the train. That pressure gave ordinary speech a clipped cadence that I would later recognise in frightened or defensive characters.

I carried a small notebook and recorded sounds, not identities: the squeal of a trolley wheel, a cough that concealed embarrassment, “Can’t you see?” spoken almost cheerfully. I marked pauses with a slash and tried to reconstruct their length before the train moved out of the station. I did not copy passengers wholesale or treat their private moments as free material. Listening required restraint. The useful thing was the pattern beneath the words, the way a voice narrowed when a subject became important and the way a silence could tell two people to continue.

Hearing What Characters Leave Unsaid

On crowded Sydney services, I noticed another rhythm: commuters lowered their eyes towards phones, podcasts and the tops of their heads. At stations, people queued for flat whites with the practised calm of a routine repeated hundreds of times. These habits created pauses. A spoken exchange had to thread between headphone worlds and carriage noise. Peak-hour travel made the carriage a temporary room shared by people who had no intention of becoming acquainted, yet their accidental exchanges exposed the social rules of the city.

Australian speech gave me another lesson in indirection. “No worries” could close an argument, “arvo” could compress half an afternoon and “she’ll be right” could express worry, distrust or resignation depending on the breath before it. I did not want these expressions to become verbal costumes. Their value lay in the way they let a character manage tone. Understatement gave people room to say “I’m not angry” without making the anger disappear.

A carriage offered no finished scene, but it supplied the exchange. “That’s lovely,” one passenger said. Another replied, “No, really. Lovely.” The words looked empty until the imagined context supplied the friction: a borrowed room, a ruined plan, perhaps an unwanted favour. In dialogue, the sentence and the subtext refuse to match, and the reader must feel the gap. That gap held more dramatic charge than an explicit statement of anger.

Turning Heard Speech Into Character

Observation provided only the beginning. If I copied every audible habit, my characters would become a crowd rather than people. I had to select details that revealed motive. A train passenger fidgeting with a receipt might be anxious about money; another might be waiting to make a confession. I learned to ask what each detail changed. When a gesture did not alter the exchange, it belonged in memory, not on the page.

Listening also travelled with me. On Irish routes, for instance, station voices and pub conversations added another set of cadences to my store. Years of listening helped me approach Gideon’s Children as a sequence of choices made in spoken language. A character needed a reason for each pause, a way of avoiding an answer and a vocabulary shaped by region and experience. The goal was an inner characterisation that other people could believe, rather than a catalogue of performed mannerisms.

The Australian market shaped how this work reached its audience. Independent bookshops, public libraries and established booksellers gave a novel and a travel memoir different routes into local hands. Regional bookshops, school libraries and online catalogues widened that reach beyond the capital cities. Dialogue still had to travel on paper, but its immediate audience was Australian: readers accustomed to understatement, quick humour and conversations where a question can mean several things.

Publication brought another responsibility. Australia’s Copyright Act 1968 protects literary work, and rules concerning recording private conversations vary across states and territories. An overheard exchange can be a vivid note, yet it is not automatically a paragraph ready to print. When I used interview material, I sought permission and checked what could properly be quoted. This did not make listening cautious; it made it responsible, which is essential if fiction draws its life from other people’s speech.

A Listening Practice for Everyday Life

The method travels well beyond rails. A humid Brisbane morning can supply the same material: an umbrella dripping in a carriage, a station coffee order changed at the last moment, two colleagues speaking warmly while avoiding the task that has gone wrong. The exercise is not to copy the people. It is to catch the pressure under their words. That wider attention to ordinary joy also shapes the small creative project I call Happy Things Maker, where curiosity can become something tangible.

For years I kept two simple checklists. The first asked me to collect sounds that could interrupt or clarify a line of dialogue:

• The chime of closing doors and the scrape of a bag across a carriage floor.
• A station announcement half swallowed by tunnel noise.
• The softened vowels of “no worries” after a small mistake.
• A passenger rehearsing a phone message under their breath.

The second checklist turned those sounds into practice. Each exercise forced me to hear structure beneath the words:

• Rewrite one brief exchange with the politeness removed, then restore it more precisely.
• Read a scene aloud and mark every phrase no character would actually say.
• Give each person a different reason to avoid the obvious question.
• Pause before replying in a notebook and record what the silence contains.

The lists are modest, but they keep the ear alert. On a busy platform I now notice the moment a stranger changes register to regain control, the instant a joke lands badly or the pause that means a decision has been made. A station timetable supplies another lesson: departures are deadlines, and deadlines alter the way people speak. Dialogue becomes less something I manufacture on the page and more something I assemble from rhythm, interruption and intention.

Carry the Characters Into the Carriage

Train travel taught me that nobody speaks in a vacuum. Every character enters a scene carrying another conversation, and every answer is shaped by fatigue, class, region, urgency and the wish to be understood. I carried those lessons into fiction and nonfiction. They taught me to let one line answer an unspoken question, to use silence without making it mystical and to let ordinary words carry more pressure than a speech. The characters who stayed with me were not the loudest passengers. They were the ones whose quiet words changed the temperature of the carriage.

That work now sits alongside my biography, blog, media interviews, book excerpts and purchase information on the Howard G Franklin website. Gideon’s Children offers a fictional world in which those listening skills can be examined, while An Irish Experience records travel, place and the stories encountered along the way. The website also provides links to booksellers, including Australian outlets, so readers can move from an excerpt to the finished work.

Read Gideon’s Children through an Australian bookseller, then open An Irish Experience and listen for the moments when movement and memory bring strangers into the same conversational weather.