Sam: It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
*
Most of us have spent a good portion of our lives talking to other humans; we’d all like to believe we have a pretty good grasp on what normal conversation sounds like. What many don’t inherently consider is that dialogue in fiction is not the way that most people speak.
I’ve done transcription for interviews and even the most well-spoken person falls into patterns of half-finished sentences, broken up with Um’s and Like’s. We rarely form perfect, coherent thoughts that can be transcribed into flawless quotes (unless we have a lot of practice at it). Thankfully, our brains naturally fill in the blanks, so even a spoken story that breaks into a series of non sequiturs and half-formed sentences can be understood.
While it’s not uncommon for writers to include the occasional stutter or filler word in dialogue, it is important to remember that we are not trying to replicate actual speech. We are inventing an approximation, a fantasy of what we’d like to believe we sound like.
What Makes for Good Dialogue
“Good” dialogue is a tricky thing to define, and like all aspects of writing, is largely subjective. There are some who adore the snappy, quip-filled dialogue found in Marvel movies, and others who can’t stand it. You will have use your own judgement and keep in mind what effect you want that dialogue to have—whether it’s evoking laughter, tears, annoyance, or fear.
Here’s a good starting point:
Does it sound “too real” or too unreal?
Does your dialogue tell us something about the character?
How can different characters stand out through dialogue?
Does it flow?
Is it interesting?
Too Real vs. Unreal
We’ve established you don’t want your dialogue to mimic everyday speech. This is where you can get into the category of sounding “too real.” Real life conversations don’t have agendas; they don’t happen to further our personal growth as people. We make small talk, we tell silly, meandering stories to make our friends laugh, to vent about minor inconveniences, or just talk about weather and share tidbits of news.
Your book dialogue should seldom be meandering. Particularly as you start out and hone your craft, it is important to make each word count. How can your dialogue further the plot, develop the characters and their relationships, convey something about the world that the reader needs to know? Don’t get caught in the trap of trying to tell a “true” story (“But this is how my friends sound when they talk and my character is meant to evoke that!”), tell an interesting one.
If benign “too real” dialogue is dominating your story, you also risk slowing your pacing to a halt. Readers will dread long passages of dialogue if the exchanges are bland and never telling us what we actually want to know.
This may sound contradictory, but sometimes writers can have the opposite problem, where their dialogue does not sound like anything a person would truly say. But Tana, you just said not to make dialogue mirror real life speech! Yes! And therein lies the art! You must strike the balance of making an approximation of speech, something that evokes and reveals the subtleties of your story, while also not making it feel stiff, clunky, awkward, or overbaked. This is what I would categorize as “unreal” dialogue. The kind that makes your reader squint and say to themselves, “No one talks like this.”
The best way to check for this is reading your dialogue out loud. If it feels awkward and clunky to say, it probably reads that way!
The most common way I see writers fall into the trap of “unreal” dialogue is when they use it as a vessel for relaying world building or plot details. While this can be deftly done, you want to take care you’re not info-dumping through the mouth of your characters. Consider: would these characters, enmeshed in their reality, naturally be having a conversation about the technicalities of food production, the economic status of their city, the way their system of government works, or would they more likely know that already? Would your character care about that stuff or be informed enough to talk about it?
Do they sound like they are trying to educate the reader or actually connect with the other person in the story?
Telling on Your Characters
Dialogue, like other forms of prose, should be telling us something about the people in your story. Some folks like to use dialects or accents to establish a person’s origins. Be wary, however, that applying dialects within a character’s speech can often slip into stereotyping, particularly if you are not part of the group or dialect.
It’s important to remember as well that you don’t have to use dialects to make your characters distinct. Ask yourself what kind of vocabulary they have. A young character may not use big or fancy words compared to someone much older. An upper class academic with an Ivy League education will have different speech pattern from a person who dropped out in 6th grade. And note that none of those backgrounds indicate whether a person is “smart” or wise. Their world views will differ; their experiences will color their biases and beliefs.
The amount of dialogue a character has can also be telling. Maybe your MC is a chatterbox who cannot help themselves from oversharing, or perhaps they are someone who’s learned opening up is dangerous and vulnerable. Maybe they never say a word. Perhaps learning or unlearning their tendencies is a part of their arc.
Movies that are praised for their writing and dialogue aren’t hailed because they’re true to life; it is because the dialogue evokes something about the story and the characters.
The monologue above from Tolkien’s The Two Towers puts a lump in my throat every time I read it, and not merely because it is poignant. Sam’s speech comes at bleak, low point for both characters. It is a testament to Sam’s good heart, his strength of spirit, and importantly, it is told in his voice. Samwise doesn’t suddenly become more loquacious just because he’s monologuing. He isn’t using terms he wouldn’t ordinarily; the words still sound like a humble gardener.
It is important as well that the monologue comes a good way through the story, toward the end of the second installment of Lord of the Rings. This speech wouldn’t have half the impact if Sam had spoken it at the start of their journey, before any bad things had happened. The timing of a character’s big moment in dialogue can be just as important as the dialogue itself.
Using Dialogue to Stand Out
If your characters still feel like they sound too much alike, one exercise to play with is to remove all your dialogue tags and paste out an exchange with nothing but quotation marks and line breaks to divide them. Can you still tell who is who? Is there a way to make it more obvious, to make a line sound like one character versus another?
There are a thousand and one ways to do that. Maybe it’s vocabulary, maybe it’s a curtness in their speech, a penchant for swear words, maybe a character is bilingual and occasionally slips into their mother tongue when they’re stressed or upset. Maybe one character is a nervous people pleaser, and the other is an asshole who values bluntness and “honesty” over protecting another’s feelings. How will those personality types evoke different speech patterns? And how can such disparate characters interact to make explosive, tension riddled dialogue?
Context will always be important, so don’t fret if every out-of-context exchange doesn’t read as black and white between characters. You don’t want to go so overboard with giving verbal tics and specialized syntax for each character that they begin to sound unreal and more like caricatures.
Does it Flow?
This piece of advice applies to more than just dialogue but to every line in your book. In fact, it’s something I’ve said already in this very post.
Read your dialogue out loud.
Ideally, you should read most of your books out loud to better hear how the prose reads, but nowhere is that more important than for dialogue. If something doesn’t sound right, trust that instinct.
Say you publish your book (independently or traditionally), and you decide to release an audiobook version of your story (fingers crossed!). Whether you hire someone or decide to read it yourself, you don’t want that to be the moment you realize your prose is stilted and awkward.
I’ve read books where the prose glides off the page and some that felt so jagged that I felt like I was running my eyes across a handsaw. If characters consistently struggle to convey their thoughts or the flow is poor, a reader will start to gloss over the text and may stop reading altogether.
I start this unit by saying, whatever else they are, characters must interesting, and that extends to their dialogue as well. That is one half of the action they can take in the world of your story, the other being physical action; through their words, they established who they are, how they treat others, how they unite or divide, and it goes a long way in determining how likeable they are to a reader.
It’s not your job to make virtuous, goody-two-shoes protagonists, but I have put down many books simply because I found a main character’s dialogue and actions to be obnoxious and bewildering.
Is it Interesting?
Interesting dialogue does more than simply convey something about a character but tells us about the story. The example of Sam’s speech in The Two Towers is an important milestone in his and Frodo’s choice to carry on, and it moves other characters enough to aid them. But you don’t always need someone to make grandstanding speeches to be effective.
One of my favorite exercises for crafting interesting dialogue comes from Sol Stein’s On Writing book. It comes from an improv exercise where two actors are each given a card detailing what they need to ask for or accomplish. The trick is that neither actor is allowed to ask what’s on the card directly and are instead forced to find ways around it.
The result is two people who want something badly, whose desire to ask that question only grows, while needing to find increasingly clever ways to get what they want. You can apply this same exercise with your characters!
Our characters cannot always come out and state exactly what they need, and it would be quite dull of that’s all they ever did. How does their dialogue change when they don’t trust themselves or others enough to come out with it? And how satisfying will it be once they finally allow themselves to be vulnerable enough to ask?
Consider putting two (or more) characters in this situation. What does each of them need from the other, and what happens when you disallow them to ask for it point-blank? By avoiding the obvious and direct option, you begin to show infinitely more about your character than point-blank dialogue would allow.
Dialogue Recap:
Don’t make your dialogue mirror true to life speech and fall into the “too real” trap
Avoid using your dialogue as an excuse for info dumping. Ask: would your characters genuinely be talking about this or are you only trying to educate the reader?
How can your dialogue tell us something about the characters, their relationship, their world, or advance the story? Avoid meandering “small talk.”
How can you make your characters’ dialogue distinct enough that your reader can more easily differentiate who is speaking? How can their background inform that?
Does the dialogue flow? Have you read it out loud?