Oblique dialogue

Oblique dialogue is speech that comes at its subject sideways — replying to something other than the question asked — so that what the characters want stays under the exchange rather than in it.

Sol Stein's example in On Writing is two lines long and teaches the whole technique:

SHE: How are you? HE: Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see you.

He does not answer her question. Something else is going on in him and it surfaces instead, and a reader leans in to find out what. Stein's claim is unusually strong — that the writers he coached who learned to make dialogue oblique all took a large step forward — and it survives testing, because directness is what flattens most draft conversation.

It is not evasiveness for its own sake. The reply has to come from what the character actually wants, which is why the Mamet formulation is the companion to it: nobody speaks unless they want something. Ask who wants what, what happens if they do not get it, and why it has to be now.

Two related repairs. Tennis-match dialogue — statement, perfect comeback, statement, perfect comeback — releases tension every second line; miscommunication and deflection let it build instead. And questions are weaker than statements: a character who asserts commits to something, while a character who asks is waiting for the other one to move.