How to Write Dialogue That Sounds Real

Here is a transcript of real speech:

"Hey. Hi. How are you?"

"Good, yeah. You?"

"Yeah, good. Busy."

"Same."

That is exactly how people talk. It is also unreadable, which is the first thing to understand: realistic dialogue is not a recording. Real conversation is mostly maintenance. Fiction dialogue is what happens when people need something from each other and cannot ask directly.

The core rule: characters want something

Every line should be doing a job. Not necessarily an obvious one.

Before writing an exchange, decide what each person wants from the other in that room. Not in the book. In the room, in the next four minutes.

She wants him to offer. He wants to leave without being asked.

Now the small talk is not small. "How are you" becomes a move. Nothing else in the scene changes. Suddenly every line carries.

That is most of what people mean by subtext. It is not hidden meaning sprinkled on afterward. It is two people wanting incompatible things and neither saying so.

Cutting

Three cuts, in order of how much they improve a scene.

Cut the greeting and the goodbye. Enter late, leave early. Start at the first interesting line, end before the conversation resolves politely.

Cut the confirmations. "Okay." "Right." "I see." Real speech is full of them. They do nothing on the page.

Cut the information the reader already has. Characters explaining plot to each other is the most common dialogue failure. If both characters know it, they will not say it. A reader notices instantly.

The test I use: read only one character's lines, straight through. If it still makes sense as a sequence of moves, the scene is working. If it reads as a person supplying information, it is not a conversation.

Tags and beats

Use "said". It is invisible, which is the point. Readers do not register it. "Expostulated" stops them dead.

Cut adverbs in tags. "She said nervously" is telling the reader what the line failed to convey. If the line is not nervous, fix the line.

Beats beat tags. An action in place of a tag does two jobs at once.

"I don't mind." He put the cup down carefully.

We get who spoke plus what they are managing. No adverb needed.

Do not beat constantly. Nodding, smiling, sipping, looking away. A page of that reads like stage directions. Beats are for the moments where the body contradicts the words.

Let unattributed lines run. Once two people are established, you can go several exchanges with no tags at all. Readers track it. The scene speeds up.

Making people sound different

If you can delete the names and still tell who is speaking, you have done this. Most drafts fail it.

What actually differentiates a voice:

• Sentence length. Some people answer in three words. Some cannot stop.

• Whether they answer the question. Enormously characterizing. Evasion has a shape.

• What they call things. The same object is "the car", "the Volvo" or "that thing".

• What they never say. Someone who never apologizes is characterized by the absence.

Accent spelling is not voice. Phonetic dialect is hard to read and has aged badly. Suggest origin with rhythm and word choice instead.

The check that works: put one character's lines in a document, alone, then read them. Voice drift is invisible while reading forward and obvious when stacked up. If two characters' lists sound alike, they are the same person in different clothes.

When a line is wrong and I cannot fix it, I generate a few alternatives with Rewrite and pick. Choosing between four versions is a different activity from accepting one. It keeps the judgment with me.

Formatting

The conventions are boring and worth getting right, because errors read as amateur before anyone judges the content.

• New speaker, new paragraph. Always.

• Punctuation inside the quotation marks in US style.

• Comma before a tag, period before a beat. "I know," she said. against "I know." She sat down.

• A long speech running several paragraphs takes an opening quote on each paragraph, closing quote only at the end.

Where dialogue does most work

In romance, dialogue is the relationship. The arc happens in what two people can and cannot say to each other, so a scene where they finally say it directly is a structural event.

In any genre, the strongest dialogue scenes are usually the ones where somebody is trying not to have the conversation. The reader leans in because they can see what is being avoided.

And if a scene is thin rather than wrong, the fix is often not more talking. It is what the room is doing while they talk, which gives the silence somewhere to sit.