For today’s blog post, I’d like to go over one of the most important parts of any story–dialogue. 

Dialogue is hard to get right! It can seem too complicated, too flowery, too casual, or just… off. In order to work, dialogue in a story has to do a lot of things sucessfully.

Here’s a list of some tips I use to get dialogue right:

1. Examine tone. For your dialogue to feel like it fits the story, it has to match the overall tone of your story. 

– Part of this comes from genre; a mystery novel will probably sound very different from a comedy. 

– The rest of this will come from your own voice as a writer; Lemony Snicket has a very different writing style than William Faulkner, and this is reflected in dialogue. 

2. Consider character. Dialogue will of course be affected by the character doing the speaking. This is influenced by a few factors:

– Profession: a tavern owner will sound very different from a queen. What does your character do? What rules of etiquette must be followed? 

– Upbringing: Characters raised as nobles will speak differently than a common-born peasant. What class was your character born in? Were they educated in a school, or did they have to learn on their own on the streets? 

– Personality: The last big factor for a character’s dialogue is their personality. A brash brawler will be much more loose with words than a reserved scholar. Ask, how does the character’s temperament affect their speech? Do they act (and therefore speak) on impulse, or do they consider everything carefully before opening their mouth? Are they good at reining in their emotions, or do they have trouble managing their temper, and therefore their words?

3. Set your setting. Time and place affect dialogue as much as character does. If your story is set in the Middle Ages, your characters won’t use modern slang. If you are having your plot play out in a schoolroom, characters will speak very differently than on a battlefield. 

4. Take care when employing accents. Often, accents can actually detract and distract from the story more than they help. When employing a character who has a strong accent, consider how to make the words on your page express this while still being readable. 

– Listen to the accent you want to use on youtube or another type of recording. Make note of what words sound truly different and how, and use those words/spellings strategically while leaving the rest as they would look normally. What words slip by faster, what words get blurred?

5. Read your dialogue aloud. When you read your dialogue, you’ll find phrases that are hard to say, word choice that seems awkward, or sentences that are just clunky and unnatural when said that really look fine on the page.

6. Dialogue tags are your friend. You can describe how a voice sounds without changing how the dialogue is actually spelled, for example: “I can’t see, it’s too dark.” He said, his voice sharp with crisp consonants. 

– Start a new line every time the speaker changes. This makes it clearer to the reader who is speaking,

– Drop the tags sometimes. If you only have two people speaking, you don’t need the “he said, she said” on every line, especially if your characters have distinct voices! Make sure that when doing this, you set the writing down for a few days and come back to it, or have someone else read it to see if it makes sense.

– Don’t be afraid of adverbs, no matter how much people say to drop them. Especially in first drafts, adverbs can be helpful in deciding the general shape of a conversation and the character’s reactions. You can always go back in and modify your descriptions later if you decide you’ve used too many!

7. Lastly, leave room for oddities. Let your dialogue be organic and realistic by employing these tactics:

– In spoken language, misunderstandings happen a lot. Allow your characters to do this too. Did they just hear something wrong, or were they just not listening? Did they have to repeat themself and end up modifying what they were saying?

– Real people jump around in conversations. Perhaps they forgot a point they meant to bring up earlier, or their thoughts jumped ahead to something marginally related. Including these types of conversational jumps can make your characters seem more real.

– Conversations get interrupted. Picture, two characters at a restaurant are having a conversation about the weather, when the waitress arrives to take their order. Real people put the conversation on pause to deal with tasks at hand and pick it back up a few moments, minutes, hours, or even days later. 

And that’s all I have for you today. Are there any tips or tricks you employ to make your dialogue believable? Let me know in the comments below! 

Thanks for reading,

– Ember