Three Tips to Write Better Dialogue
You may not immediately think so, but dialogue can make or break a work of fiction. When I wrote about common writing mistakes, I didn’t touch on dialogue, but it’s not because dialogue is easy. It’s because it’s hard, and the mistakes writers make when writing dialogue aren’t, in my opinion, rookie mistakes.
Even veteran writers may have instances of stilted, bland, or unbelievable dialogue. So here’s three tips to help you write better dialogue.
Keep it moving
The action of a book will likely slow, at least a little, when dialogue occurs. Sure, you can write quippy back and forth between the hero and villain while they fight, but in general, dialogue will happen when there’s a lull in the action and the characters have time and space to breathe and interact.
Even so, the key to good dialogue is to weave it into the story in a way that continues driving things forward. The simplest possible example of this would be dialogue between adventurers as they journey from point A to point B, as they set up their camp, as they cook their food, or otherwise go about their adventuring.
In practical terms, this means using action and description sentences in the middle of dialogue.
An example:
“Hang on, wait for me,” called Perry as he jogged behind Jim.
Jim did not slow, but marched through the thick brush. His machete tore through the foliage—THWACK, THWACK, THWACK.
“If you can’t keep up, you shouldn’t have come.”
The brief description of Jim’s actions helps to move things along, highlighting that Jim and Perry’s conversation is happening concurrently with the journey that will move the plot forward.
Keep it simple
I hate tags. Just ask my wife and she’ll tell you I never wear a shirt unless the tag has been cut from it. But I don’t always cut so viciously from my dialogue, and I should. Dialogue tags are sometimes necessary, but almost always an irksome necessity. Especially when they are used too often and with too much diversity.
You will never need more than two different dialogue tags. With nothing but said and asked, you can write killer dialogue. On rare occasions, you may find a good opportunity to use other tags—like replied—but as a rule, you should cut dialogue tags whenever you can. Even when you can’t, you should stick to basics.
When combined with the first tip, you’ll find cutting dialogue tags isn’t as difficult as it may sound. Action and description sentences can show who is speaking by virtue of showing what the character is doing while they speak. After all, we never sit still, staring blankly at one another exchanging words.
That brings me to my last point.
Keep it real
Have you seen those short clips of people pretending to be NPCs from video games? In real life, people don’t just talk at one another and awkwardly pause between spoken sentences to do a brief action.
When we speak to one another, we interrupt, we follow disparate trains of thoughts, we miscommunicate, and we repeat ourselves. We answer questions indirectly, or non-verbally. We communicate with gestures, facial expressions, and wordless sounds. We make jokes. We get distracted. Perfect dialogue is imperfect because anything else is unbelievable.
Learning to write dialogue that feels alive takes time and a lot of practice. The good news is that lots of things count as practice. Watching movies or TV shows with lots of dialogue counts as practice. Hosting a dinner party with close friends counts as practice. Reading books is practice. And of course, writing dialogue counts as practice too.
And when you do these things, take the time to really ingest and contemplate what does and doesn’t sound right. Consider asking your friends to let you record a conversation to listen to later. Replay the best (and worst) scenes of dialogue to pick them apart.
Bad dialogue can kill a story just as surely as gaping plot holes or flat characters, but it doesn’t have to kill your story. Writing well takes work, but it’s work worth doing.
