Dialogue Writing... Finding the ... Gaps!

I bet you thought I was talking about pauses. I'm not. 

How often do you say exactly what you mean? For me, the only time I aim at absolute unequivocal clarity is when I'm pitching, presenting or lecturing, and even then I rarely nail it. Inevitably there are gaps. 

Consider this scenario, I’m sure you’ve experienced it; you chance upon a friend on the street -someone you might not have seen for a while- you stop to talk and you ask how she is. She smiles and tells you that life’s great, and despite the smiles and the words you know that something is wrong, but you don’t want to pry so you maintain the charade that you believe what she is telling you, but there it is, a gap between what is said and what we actually understand. 

Gaps come in many forms. Gaps between what is said and what the other person understands (as above), or gaps between what is said and what is meant, or gaps between what is said and the truth and many more to boot.

Sometimes the gaps are intentional, we might conceal something to save the other person from offence or embarrassment, or because we don't want to reveal that which we deem too personal or too contentious, or because we're masking our real feelings. On other occasions we might create accidental gaps. We might be in a rush, or perhaps we're just not so good at articulating ourselves, or perhaps we're feeling lazy and can't be bothered to say exactly what we mean, or perhaps the subject matter is complex and we don't have the language for it.

Creating these gaps in your rendering of dialogue enables your readers -and ultimately your film’s audience- to participate in your film. Because the meaning is in the subtext, your reader or audience has to do some interpreting or decoding and it is exactly that kind of dialogue writing that creates and sustains reader and audience engagement.

I'm not saying that everything has to be deep, ambiguous, cerebral or enigmatic, but as the writer you play with an entire spectrum of intended comprehension and the sharing of meaning. 

So ask yourself, does my character need to be crystal clear in this moment or does it benefit the story to have my audience do some working out at this point?