Photo by Harishan Kobalasingam.
In my experience, writers usually feel strongly about creating dialogue, either loving or hating the challenge of building plot and character through seemingly genuine conversation. And more often than not, those feelings are evident in their subsequent manuscripts. Fortunately, although great dialogue may not be easy to craft, the process doesn’t have to be painful.
Of course, there is no single “correct” approach to writing dialogue. The below advice is meant to help authors decrease some of the anxiety around the process and avoid what I have found to be the most common pitfalls in composing naturalistic conversations, including
exposition dumps;
overly formal, complex, or otherwise awkward language;
unnecessary repetition;
boring, flat, and extraneous passages; and
out-of-character statements.
Your usage may vary.
Drafting with your gut
A good first draft of dialogue will be focused and feel natural. To accomplish the former, you need to approach your scene with purpose. To accomplish the latter, you want to write from your gut, allowing your characters’ words to pour out of them rather than being forced upon them by the needs of the story.
Before writing a scene, you should have some idea of what its purpose will be and how it will move your plot along. Doing so will give your characters and their conversation a clear destination and path to follow, but also room to experiment and grow.
Once you have a sense for where you want the scene to go, allow yourself to sink into your characters, feeling the drives that propel them forward as well as the histories that weigh them down.
Now, write.
Revising with your head
When you’re ready to revise, it’s time to hop out of your characters’ skins and review the scene from the outside. Here are some key aspects to consider.
Turn up the tension
There’s what we think, what we want to communicate, and what we actually communicate. These three things rarely line up perfectly, and that fact is a primary source of tension in dialogue.
When you revise, make sure you are playing up to this tension. Not only will it keep your readers interested, but it will clue them in to important facets of your characters’ desires and personalities.
Remember, too, that people communicate at least as much through body language and facial expressions as they do through words. Be sure to use your characters’ physicality to either support or conflict with what they say.
Disparities between the perspectives of your characters is another natural source of tension in dialogue. This doesn’t mean every interaction you write needs to be hostile, but you should keep an eye open for places where misunderstandings or contrasting perspectives might occur—especially in ways that are relevant to the plot—and then lean in to those moments.
Refine the rhythm
Refining the rhythm of your dialogue requires both cutting and expanding in the revision stage, and usually involves bouncing back-and-forth between the two.
Tighten your writing by cutting or summarizing any lines that don’t move the plot forward, build character, or establish setting. Strive for phrases that do at least two of these at once.
Cut unnecessary repetition, flabby phrasing, or other extraneous words.
Look for opportunities to add white space. Unless there are strong character or stylistic reasons to have long, speech-like paragraphs, these should be broken up.
Likewise, most of the time you want to break-up complex sentences and simplify vocabulary. Reading your dialogue aloud will help you hear what works and what doesn’t.
Check your dialogue tags. Words like “said” or “asked” should be sparing; the voices and perspectives of well-written characters can do most of the work of identifying each speaker.
If you find you need tags on every line, this may be a sign that your characterization isn’t strong and you need to tweak the dialogue itself to more clearly evoke the speaker’s personality/point-of-view. (That being said, contemporary readers and editors usually prefer accents and vocal tics to be handled like a strong spice: added sparingly for flavor but not laid on so heavily that they overwhelm the actual meat of the scene.)
Dialogue tags should sometimes be supplemented with, or replaced entirely by, descriptions of body language, facial expressions, or interior thoughts. Adding these moments of description can keep passages of dialogue from feeling too thin and provide your readers with important context regarding your characters’ personalities and states of mind.
Similarly, inserting brief descriptions of the setting or surrounding action—especially when it reflects, conflicts with, interrupts, or otherwise affects your characters’ discussion—is another effective way of adding layers and dynamism to a scene.
Check for character and plot consistency
Drafting from the gut can mean that what comes out sounds more like the author than the character. Or worse, we might have our characters say something that seems to work in the moment, but takes them to a place we really don’t want them to go. For instance, if you have a series-recurrent character who up to this point has always been meek or kind or wise, you don’t want her to suddenly become aggressive or mean or reckless unless you have established a very believable reason for her to do so and are prepared to deal with the repercussions of that conflicting behavior going forward.
When you revise your dialogue, ask yourself whether each statement really makes sense for the speaker. If just a line or two sounds off, you will probably want to change those lines. If, on the other hand, the entire conversation sounds off, you might want to either rethink the character or recast the speaker altogether.
Once the first draft of your entire book is complete, you might also discover a conversation that works on its own doesn’t add much to, or even conflicts with other aspects of, the overall story. Painful as this can be, the scene will have to be trimmed or cut accordingly.
Looking for more?
Whole books can be—and have been—written on the subject of writing dialogue. If you’re searching for more in-depth advice than what I’ve put forward here, you might want to check out Crafting Dynamic Dialogue by the editors of Writer’s Digest.