15 Tips Writers Can Use to Improve Dialog

You talk, so you think you can easily make your characters talk. Wrong.

Dialogue is hard work, integral to story architecture. You don’t have two brains or two sets of life experience, let alone the psychosis necessary to be inside the heads of ten people critical to your story.

It’s time to move away from the keyboard and get outside, so you can study people as part stenographer, part psychologist, and part sociologist.

To help you succeed, pay heed to these fifteen tactics that will help you master clot in getting imagined conversation into print.

1. Dialogue is diverse. Only one character in your book can possess your personal voice; the rest of your characters must impersonate other voices. Don’t write how you talk and place your words in every character’s mouth. You must become someone else. Study the words of strangers.

2. Dialogue is meant to be spoken. When creating your stories, don’t write your dialogue. Speak it out loud, and then record the words you have created. When finishing your book, always read the dialogue aloud during the editing process. Fix it, so it becomes Talking English. Oral English and Written English are two different languages.

3. Dialogue evolves out of personality. If you have not fully defined your character, you can’t possibly be creating appropriate dialogue. You are mostly likely writing your own thoughts, not your character’s. Dialogue defines your character.

4. Dialogue builds tension. Ask yourself, “What is at risk?” Mere chit-chat bores readers. They want suspense and entertainment. The motivation of characters should be the genesis of their conversations. If there is no tension under development, your reader leaves the book on the nightstand and never returns.

5. Dialogue doesn’t dump information for information’s sake. Narrative and description do that. Please, no so-what conversations as in, “That building is big,” said John. Dialogue is more subtle. It reveals mood, offers glimpses, and drops clues.

6. Dialogue should not be journalistic. Newspaper-style comments are a common ailment among reporters turned writers. A reporter’s dialogue is characterized by quotations of factual reinforcement or proof of a point already expressed. It does little to expose personality.

7. Dialogue should be heavily scattered throughout memoirs. Otherwise, you are likely to present a myopic view of life through your own eyes. Help us see other people’s perspective of your life by remembering dialogue within the scenes of your story. In these cases, dialogue must be honest, not filtered or paraphrased by your bias.

8. Dialogue must pass the relevancy test. Use a conversation when the story calls for a character to reveal something about their personal development, needs, desires, or relationships. Re-read all your dialogue to see if it can pass this test. Conversations must move the reader forward, not bog them down.

9. Dialogue follows a pattern within story architecture, whereby narrative introduces facts, leading to scenes. Scenes play out through characters, who act, and whose words create an emotional bond (good or bad) with readers. Scenes incorporate subtext and advance a plot. As such, dialogue is a tool and has its place. Metaphorically speaking, don’t use dialogue as a hammer, when a paint brush is required.

10. Dialogue in print is imperfect because it represents actual oral speech. That means your story’s conversations will often record clipped thoughts, staccato bursts, pauses, incomplete sentences, repetition, and even poor grammar.

11. Dialogue sits next to identifiers that should be varied and comfortable. Identifiers are the words that reveal which person is speaking and how. The word said is your best friend in dialogue. That said (no pun intended), the four chief writing sins with regard to identifiers are 1) to use synonyms for said too often, 2) to use flowery adverbs, 3) to avoid using identifiers altogether so that the reader gets lost, and 4) to rely to the word said so much that the word becomes irritating.

12. Dialogue lives alongside body language. If you cannot imagine a person using body language with your dialogue, throw the line out. It is probably just information. When people are passionate about their conversation, their hands, face, body and legs move. Watch for it. Passion equals movement.

13. Dialogue requires study. Next time you are at a restaurant with friends study their speech. Then mimic their speech patterns. It is impossible to write without true-life experience. Get in the world. Teen-age fan fiction is full of one-sided dialogue from kids who have spent too much time in the basement – alone.

14. Dialogue has dual purposes. When you are hiding a clue in dialogue, the conversation has to have meaning in the present moment while simultaneously offering a hint of the future. The foreshadowing cannot stick out. You can witness shoddy execution of this principle in many popular TV crime show dramas. Dialogue will be so unrelated to the current scene that you know it is a clue toward a later resolution.

15. Dialogue is better in the context of a plan. If you are writing without a proper on-paper outline, your dialogue will suffer because you have not thought through all the intricacies of theme, plot points, and relevant scenes. Your dialogue cannot connect to whole unless you know where you are going.

ROMEO:
Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops—

JULIET:
O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

ROMEO:
What shall I swear by?

JULIET:
Do not swear at all;
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I’ll believe thee.