How To Write Dialogue
Dialogue can lead the narrative if you do it right. Image credit: PickPic
Wondering how to write dialogue?
My top tips on how to write dialogue are:
Make it conversational, not a vocab flex. Most people say something the easiest way, not the smartest way.
Think “What am I trying to say it, how would I say it out loud?”
For inspiration, watch TV and note the different styles of speech you see in the different characters.
Know who your characters are but aren’t sure how they might speak? Watching actors you think reflect their personality.
Making a playlist that reflects your character can make it easier to think like them.
Don’t overcomplicate it. Nine times out of ten, “he said, she said” is better than “he croaked, she said mournfully”.
The dialogue itself should portray the emotional, not the adverbs.
Knowing how to write dialogue can transform the narrative of your fiction writing as it’s a unique opportunity to make your characters feel real. When a reader picks up your book, they’re going to form a picture in their mind of your characters (shout out to anyone who was the right age to compare their imagined characters for Harry Potter against the actors that were cast in real life). Dialogue is how you give the reader a voice in their head to hear as they read their words, bringing the story to life and making their losses and wins all the more effective.
Dialogue can also be a great way to get information across that’s crucial to the storyline, but it has to be packaged in a way that feels like authentic human interaction. Working out what that looks like begins with understanding your characters; how their experiences have shaped them, their personality pros and cons, do they swear? Do they speak fast? All of this can add character without having to spell it out.
Working out these things can elevate your novel to the next level. For me, the easiest way of finding a character’s voice and keeping it is to be able to imagine what they would sound like in my head. Knowing the pitch, accent, and speech patterns of a character means imagining their dialogue becomes as simple as switching on the radio. You can use the voices of famous people, or make up entirely new ones, it doesn’t matter. So long as you can hear that person speaking in your head, your dialogue will reap the benefits.
In the same way writers hammer in the “show, don’t tell” sentiment to writing, your dialogue must be clever and portray thoughts, ideas, and emotions, without spelling them out for the reader. A well-placed pause in a character’s dialogue can do a better job of indicating uncertainty and a lack of conviction than saying “he said without conviction”. Same goes for breaking up speech with things like “he rubbed his sunken eyes” or “she scratched at raw skin” – what the character is doing tells us about their frame of mind, so we don’t have to.
Dialogue should also serve a purpose. If the conversation isn’t teaching us something about the characters or the story, why is it in there? It can quickly become boring if a character conversation we’re listening in on doesn’t reveal anything new or interesting to us.
The key to establishing a convincing balance is to choose your words wisely, breakup significant dialogue with nuggets of short, sharp, conversational speak, and don’t worry too much about perfect grammar. After all, how many people do you know that speak with perfect grammar?
Key Dos and Don’ts for how to write dialogue:
Idioms can be good, but cliched, tired phrases are bad.
Do use a mixture of short and long snippets or speech.
Don’t rely on adverbs to portray emotions.
Do trim unnecessary words and speech, but don’t make conversations too perfunctory.
Did you enjoy learning how to write dialogue? Check out my article on how to write a query letter and get yourself a literary agent.