Dialogue is what breathes life into fiction. It gives your story a soul. Without it, you wouldn’t have much. This is why it’s important that your dialogue is realistic and entertaining. It should reflect the differences between your characters and allow the reader to attach and connect with at least some of them. This blog goes over how you can improve your dialogue with examples and tips.
How to Write Dialogue that Sounds Authentic
Writing good dialogue comes down to quality practice. The more you get used to sensing the nuances and complexities of voice, the better you can incorporate them into your writing. Here are some tips that can help you improve:
1. Listen to people
This might seem counterintuitive because you aren’t doing any actual writing. But like I mentioned in the sensory details blog, you should try sitting somewhere in a public, ideally somewhat busy area so you can listen to how people talk. Not necessarily what they say, but how they say it. You want to expose yourself to as much diversity here as possible. Each person has a distinct voice. So do your characters. Listen for idioms, inflections, turns of phrases, and so on.
2. Read your dialogue out loud
Probably the best way to get a sense of the quality or realness of your dialogue is to read it out loud. That should help you hear the difference. If you’re constantly thinking that your dialogue doesn’t sound real enough, or the timing just isn’t right, you can go back to the drawing board and start again. You can also get other people involved if that’s an option for you. Ask someone to read your dialogue and give you feedback on if it sounds authentic.
3. Use tags sparingly
This is the advice I got from professional writers when I was studying creative writing at university. A lot of new writers get into the habit of using a lot of tags. Things like “she said sarcastically,” or “he announced”. Hotly debated is the use of adverbs as well. Stephen King has notably talked about how he abhors adverbs. I tend to agree that it’s usually a mistake if you use one, but not always. They can be used to enhance dialogue in some instances. This comes down to your intuition as a practiced writer, in my view.
Most of the time, you don’t need to say anything other than “he/she/they said.” Even if the character is asking a question. You might be tempted to write using the tag “asked” but the reader knows that a question was asked because of the question mark. In other words, it’s unnecessary. Sometimes you might add a bit of action, but you should also do this sparingly. For example, you might write “he said, moving out into the hallway.”
What Makes Dialogue so Important?
Dialogue allows the reader to get to know your characters. It’s where you give them a voice, literally. You can only do so much with exposition. Dialogue is usually more intimate than exposition, usually. We might, for example, describe a character performing a certain action that can be meaningful, but it isn’t until we hear their external voice that we can get a complete picture of what kind of person they are. Here are some of the main reasons why dialogue is so important:
1. Reveals Personality
Showing a character’s personality is one of the most important aspects of dialogue. We learn so much about who a character is through what they say. Things like how they think and what their strengths and weaknesses are; the politics they support or their verbal idiosyncrasies.
2. You learn their habits
A character should have established habits that they clearly engage in. A character in a horror novel
might display a series of ignorances that aggravate the reader during a suspenseful moment. They might whisper to their friend as they hide in the closet from some supernatural being; they might have a habit of saying too much when they need to be quiet. Either way, we get a sense of expectation from what our characters say that we can choose to defy in certain moments.
3. Establishes relationships
How characters relate with one another is another reason your dialogue needs to be sharp. Think about how characters might speak to their mother, father, spouse, love interest, colleague, boss, child, their in-laws. We have an idea of what our characters might say to each other, and so do our readers. Use your dialogue to build a dynamic between multiple sets of characters.
Exercises
Write one page of dialogue between a brother and sister. But the sister has amnesia. The brother is trying to help her remember who he is.\
Write a conversation between a patient and a doctor. The patient is perfectly healthy but doesn’t believe the doctor.
Write a conversation between someone who got pulled over for speeding and a police officer. The person who got pulled over is trying to weasel their way out of a ticket.
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