How to Write Good Dialogue
Good dialogue is a writer’s secret weapon. It builds suspense, elevates emotion, propels the narrative forward, and adds depth and richness to characters. Here are our top tips for writing impactful and effective dialogue. . .
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Keep dialogue brief and succinct
Each piece of dialogue must do at least one of the following things: create tension, resolve tension, reveal backstory, move the narrative forward, convey the relationship between certain characters, or divulge important plot information. Great dialogue does several of these things at once.
Being purposeful and succinct are actually two of the most important components of good writing in general. If you think this is something you might need to work on, you should consider giving flash fiction a go. Writing very short stories really forces you to make every word count. If you don’t have much experience with flash, our list of 100 Awesome Flash Fiction Prompts is a really good resource to get you started.
Realise that dialogue is often more fun to write than it is to read
Obviously, some writers will hate writing dialogue. But more often than not, a new writer will find dialogue the most fun part of writing. Just because it was enjoyable to write, doesn’t mean it will be enjoyable to read. No matter how good you think you are at writing dialogue; pages and pages of long soliloquies and endless exchanges will actually be a complete snooze-fest for your readers.
Know your characters really well before you start writing
Three dimensional, well-rounded, interesting, and realistic characters are the key to good writing. Make sure each character is fully formed before you begin. You should at least know their age, where they come from, their level of education, their personality traits, their relationship to other characters in the story, and what their motivations are. If you know your characters really well, you’ll know how to write dialogue that rings true.
You might even want to create profiles on your main characters before you begin to write. If you know you’re going to be writing dialogue for these characters, start thinking about who they are and how this will affect their speech.
Are they taciturn or communicative? This might influence whether they initiate the dialogue and speak in long sentences, or only give short replies.
Are they self-assured or diffident? This might affect whether they speak in full sentences or if their dialogue has a tendency to trail off.
Where are they from? This will affect the individual words they use.
Really take the time to get to know your characters and your dialogue will speak volumes about who they are.
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Know everything your characters know
This is another way to make your characters feel like real people. What does your character do for a living? What are their hobbies and interests? What did they study at university? In real life, the knowledge we get from these experiences will slip into our conversations without us thinking much about it.
For example, if one of your characters is a botanist — and this is relevant to your story — spend the time to research this. A character’s background, education, life choices, and backstory will not only inform their motivations, but also the way they think, speak, and react.
You can then sprinkle your dialogue with some words or terms that only a botanist (or a scientific person) would know. Just make sure these bits of dialogue are also serving other functions too.
For example, if your character lost their mother as a child — and this is also relevant to the plot— you could have that character mention the flowers at her funeral. He probably wouldn’t have known the flowers’ names at the time, but a botanist reliving that experience might not simply say, ‘white flowers’. The addition of words like ‘Gardenia’ and ‘Dahlia’ will instantly lend a certain amount of credibility to your characters.
This goes for writing in general, too. Nothing reads more amateur than a story without the proper, technical words for things, used when appropriate. We go into more detail about this in our ‘Top Tips for Writing Fiction’ article.
Break up dialogue with action
A good story is like a bolting horse. The first part of the story is the opening of the barn doors. From then on, the whole thing needs to have a forward motion to it.
This doesn’t mean that it necessarily has to be fast-paced and full of action, but it does mean that every aspect of your writing needs to be building towards something.
There’s nothing worse than a story that feels static. Whole chunks of dialogue that aren’t broken up with any action will bring the pace of your story to a standstill.
In this case, action can be as simple as a character brushing the hair away from their eyes, or being distracted by something, or shifting in their seat.
Just make sure you use the action to not only break up the dialogue, but tell us something about the way the characters are feeling in the moment. We can’t stress this enough:
The measure of good writing is how many different functions each word or sentence is performing; and how subtly and effectively those functions are being performed.
No small-talk
When reading about how to write dialogue, you’ll often see what appears to be conflicting advice. You’ll be told to make your dialogue as realistic as possible, but also to avoid certain real-life speech patterns and behaviours.
Actually, you don’t want your dialogue to be realistic, but you do want it to ring true. You want it to be authentic, but not too real.
In real life, we use small-talk to fill up the spaces between important exchanges. In writing, we never want any filler. As we’ve said before: good writing is about making every word count. Small-talk isn’t important — and it certainly isn’t interesting to read!
Dialogue in fiction should be more weighty, poignant, and dramatic than real-life conversations. It’s a subtly hyped up version of reality that still feels authentic and true. Cut out all the fluff and throwaway lines and your writing will be instantly stronger.
Next, you need to look again at the dialogue you have left over. Try to find ways to make it a little punchier. Sometimes, during rewrites, we have a tendency to neglect dialogue. This might be because in real life there are no rewrites when it comes to speaking. This can lead us to wrongly believe that our first attempt is going to be fine.
Actually, dialogue needs just as much attention and reworking as any other part of your story. Take each line of dialogue and think about what function it’s performing, then rewrite it several times over trying to find the most interesting, effective, and succinct way of saying the same thing.
Just remember to keep the character in mind as you rewrite. If you don’t, you might end up with great dialogue that doesn’t quite fit the person who is saying it.
Weave the dialogue into the prose
A good story is like a dance between dialogue and narrative prose. They should fit together seamlessly like a dancer effortlessly lifting their partner into the air, and then gracefully lowering them back down; the dance never feeling interrupted or stalled.
Your dialogue should rise out of the prose, elevate it in some way, and then be subsumed back into the narrative. We’re talking, of course, about your story’s flow.
You can test the flow of your story first by reading it out loud to yourself. However, your familiarity with the piece can sometimes smooth out the way you read it. You subconsciously change the rhythm to fit the way you want it to sound, not the way it actually sounds.
To get around this, you should try uploading your story to different devices. The different formats can interrupt that familiarity, and you should suddenly be able to spot areas that aren’t flowing as well as they should.
You can also ask someone else to read the story aloud to you. How does it sound when read with fresh eyes?
Choose your words carefully
Make sure each character only uses words that fit with the kind of person they are and how they’re feeling in that particular moment.
When you’re writing prose, you’re either expressing yourself, as a writer or channelling the narrator. When you write dialogue, you should be speaking as each individual character.
Think about their background and personality, but also think about their mood, emotions, and motivations in the scene. All of this will affect their choice of words.
This is where looking up synonyms can be really useful. For example, when we’re angry or excited we tend to use stronger, more impactful words. We’d be more likely to use the word ‘huge’ rather than just ‘big’.
Be careful though, you don’t want your character to sound like they swallowed a thesaurus. (Unless their personality is that of a pretentious nitwit who does in fact sound like they swallowed a thesaurus!)
It can sometimes help to speak the dialogue aloud as you write it. This can really help you get into character!
Don’t info dump
Info dumping is when you divulge too much information in one go. It’s not interesting, and it’s not good storytelling. It’s like a big flashing red light letting your reader know you want them to know something.
A story is like a magic trick, and info dumping breaks the illusion. Instead of telling the reader everything upfront, try to disperse the things they need to know naturalistically throughout the story. By cleverly choosing how and when to divulge key information, you’ll take your writing to the next level.
Also, don’t be afraid to keep your reader in the dark a little longer than you might think reasonable. No one wants to read an incomprehensible story, but we also don’t want to feel like we’re totally keeping pace. This is particularly true at the start of a story.
Newbie writers are often far too concerned with making sure their reader knows what’s what right at the beginning of the story. A good rule of thumb is to have your reader two steps behind at the very start of the story, keeping pace in the middle, and then one step behind towards the end. Then it’s up to the writer whether to have a nice neat resolution or to finish the story ambiguously.
Throughout the story it’s so important to allow your reader the chance to question things, creating a much more engaging reading experience.
You should use dialogue to impart key information, but make sure you do it in subtle and interesting ways. For example, if you need the reader to know that two characters went to the same college — because it’s really important later on — instead of simply stating the fact in the prose, it can be more effective to reveal it in the dialogue. But don’t be too obvious, like this:
“You went to college with John, right?”
instead, try something like this:
“John told me you two ruled the roost at Harvard!”
The second example is working harder than the first. It’s not only more interesting, it also tells us what kind of people these two characters are and how the speaker might feel about them. Remember, good dialogue should be doing more than one thing at once.
Avoid repetition
Repetition can be an effective tool in writing. However, with dialogue, it’s almost always a bad idea. If you want to show that a character has repeated themselves, don’t repeat the actual lines of dialogue. Instead, show the affect this has on the other character or characters. Show their exasperation or impatience, or show in the actual dialogue that this is something the character has said before.
Remember, the same character will speak differently depending on who they are talking to
Always consider the relationship between the characters in the scene and how that will affect how they relate to each other.
Do they know the other person well? If they do, they will probably speak more informally.
Do they like the other character? This could affect how warm or affectionate their words are.
Do they trust the other person? If they do, they might speak more freely and openly. What’s the backstory here?
If the characters have a long, and storied history with each other, how might those events shape the dialogue?
Which character is in a position of power in this situation?
What’s lying under the surface?
Effective dialogue hints at the past, attests to the current moment, and pushes the narrative forward, all at the same time.
Leave things unsaid
How often in life do we truly say exactly what we mean? Not very often. We say things in anger, we sometimes say the opposite of what we mean, and we communicate imperfectly. We hide our true feelings, we obfuscate and we lie.
Don’t be afraid to have your characters do this too. Just make sure you let the reader in on it.
For example, if you want your reader to know one of your characters is lying, either reveal the truth to the reader earlier in the narrative or describe that character’s body language as they are telling the lie.
Kinesics is the study of non-verbal communication, and you can find a ton of information online about different expressions of body language and what they mean.
Try to incorporate body language into your writing to give a sense of how the dialogue might not be an accurate expression of what each character really means. This will add layers of complexity and intrigue to your writing.
Even if the dialogue isn’t truthful, you can still illustrate the truth lying underneath. This is how you graduate from being a good writer to a great writer.
Be consistent with your characters
As a reader, there’s nothing worse than a character suddenly acting in a way that is totally at odds with who we believe them to be.
It’s really important that you maintain the consistency of your characters throughout your story. This doesn’t mean that they cannot change or behave out of character — people do that in real life all the time. But as a writer, you need to either foreshadow this behaviour change earlier on in the story or you’ll need to provide a reasonable explanation not too long after.
Make sure your dialogue follows the rules of consistency too. If a character is quite reserved and not prone to long bouts of dialogue, you can’t just change that later in the story without effectively setting it up.
If a reserved character suddenly seems to find their voice, that’s absolutely fine — character arcs are vital — but you’ll need to make the reader absolutely believe in the transformation, otherwise it just won’t ring true.
Also, watch out for inarticulate characters suddenly becoming inexplicably eloquent or characters from one part of the country suddenly sounding as if they grew up somewhere else.
As we’ve said before, you really want your characters to feel like real, living people and there’s nothing like obvious inconsistencies to break that illusion.
Not all characters should have distinctive speech quirks
We can sometimes be a little overenthusiastic when it comes to assigning different speech quirks to our characters. We really want them to sound distinctively different to one another, so we give everyone in the story an easily identifiable little idiosyncrasy in the way they communicate.
Well, this isn’t very realistic and it can be easily become pretty annoying to the reader. In reality, not everyone has a speech quirk and a lot of people actually sound pretty similar in the way they speak.
If you want to assign a particular speech quirk to a character, really think about whether it fits with the kind of person they are. A neurotypical teenager who wants to fit in with their peers is perhaps less likely to use an individual speech quirk than an eccentric, older character, for example.
Variation is the key to great dialogue
If you want your dialogue to flow nicely and to fit neatly within your prose, you’ll need to be constantly working on adding variation.
Make sure the lines of dialogue vary in length and make sure you switch between dialogue tags and action tags.
The worst kind of dialogue is a simple back and forth exchange. You can break up this monotony in different ways.
Try having a character deflect by answering a question with another question. This pushes the dialogue in a totally new direction.
Have characters interrupt each other and have dialogue that trails of with the use of ellipses (. . .)
Dialogue is all about rhythm. You want it to flow, but you don’t want it be monotonous. Structure your dialogue to make sure there’s plenty of variation in the dialogue beats. If several consecutive bits of dialogue have exactly the same pattern of beats, they probably need to be broken up.
Try adding some little bits of action here and there to disrupt the monotony.
Remember, as with all aspects of writing, great dialogue is made in the edit! Rework your dialogue over and over. Put it aside for a while and then come back to it with fresh eyes to rework it again and again.
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