All readers have different standards for judging the quality of a novel. One of my top tier elements of a good book, or any fictional story, is good dialogue. Dialogue brings so much to the story including characterization, exposition, and tone, and if a writer can get that right, it elevates its ability to help you escape into its world. Below are my thoughts on why it’s important to get dialogue right in your novels.

Distinct voices

There is so much to consider when crafting characters, and the way they speak and what they say is a large chunk of that. Will your characters explain what’s going on, or are you going to leave that up to the narration and descriptions? Which characters are going to speak and when? Will the scene play as a conversation or monologue, or are you going to make the choice to play it silent or gloss over the actual words spoken?

Authors have to make a million of these decisions on every page. And they have to determine what words are best going to drive the story forward while bringing their characters to life.

Will the characters all sound the same? That’s not very realistic, but the dialogue is typically only coming from one person, the author. And it’s very difficult to keep the characters from sounding like yourself. Plenty of authors write characters who all sound alike, and it works fine, particularly when the characters speak in interesting, funny, or unique ways.

But a more believable method is to make each character sound distinct. They each bring a different vocabulary, cadence, and information to the story. It should be apparent that different people are speaking, and once you get to know them, you know who is speaking. If a character is modeled off of a specific person, listening to the way they speak and incorporating their word choice, sentence structure, and tone will help to create distinct voices throughout the story.

Word choice

So many characters speak generic lines that people don’t use in real life. Some examples include:

“I don’t want to lose you” – said by one character to another when one of them is being self-destructive.

“You’re hurt.” – stating the obvious when a character has been injured.

“No one can stop me!” – often stated by a villain who is feeling a little overly confident.

Writers get to act out these scenes in their head. And instead of these lazy, overused phrases, it’s more interesting to think of more realistic ways that characters would react to these situations.

Child characters tend to get the extra lazy treatment. Many children in adult novels are dumbed down and reduced to one-dimensional characters who sound like they’re from another time period or act younger than they are.

I’ve also read plenty of middle grade novels where the kids speak like corny adults with perfect manners and old-fashioned slang. Authors need to take the time to learn how kids are speaking in the time period in which their story is set, particularly if it’s present day. The slang and the sayings that you used as a kid have long been out of date, no matter how new to adulthood you are. Listen to how kids speak in real life, and apply that to your story.

Dialogue tricks

Writers who really concentrate on their dialogue will sometimes go to great lengths to make sure that the voice that the readers hear in their heads matches as closely to the voice that the author wants them to hear. Writing in a particular dialect is one way to help with this authenticity. American writers remove the “g” from the ends of words for southern characters. They toughen up their language for New Yorkers. And they make sure to accentuate the accents of foreign speakers.

This can be helpful in really placing the readers in a particular time or place. But it can also slow down the story’s pacing. Trying to sound out difficult passages of dialogue where words are run together, letters are missing, and entire phrases are missing can be a frustrating process to try to figure out what a character is saying.

When I read, I tend to skim over these rocky lines because they are so clunky to read, both in your head or aloud. And in doing so, I can miss important plot points, particularly when a significant piece of information is given to a difficult-to-understand character to say.

Writing for your audience

When I read bad dialogue, I’m often waiting for the punchline. I’m hoping that the author knows that a line is bad and that it’s part of the story and will be addressed. When it’s not, I feel like the author is out of touch with the way people speak, and it takes me out of the story.

If a young character is going to talk like an old person, there had better be a reason behind it. They’d better be an old person trapped inside a young person’s body. If a character is going to be flirtatious, a general reader should come out of it with a clear idea that their attempts were either a success or a failure, and that had better match what follows in the story.

Now, different genres have different standards when it comes to how characters talk. It’s the same scale as watching an Oscar-nominated drama vs. a Hallmark romance movie. Some readers want authenticity while others want cheesy, never gonna happen in the real world, lines. What works for some readers may not work for others.

If a story is supposed to be innocent and charming, so should its dialogue. A serious and even brutal story is going to need rough and even obscene dialogue. And if you’re going to play against type, it should be tested and experimented to make sure that it works. And wondering if something is working is one of the scariest feelings that writers experience while crafting their work and the number one reason for self-doubt.

Listen to how people speak

When you’re out in public, listen to how people speak. Use that way of speaking for characters who match the people you hear in the world. Keep a notebook of interesting sentences that you hear as you eavesdrop at the grocery story or the museum or ballgames.

Keep your dialogue consistent for each character. Give them catchphrases. We all have our go-to curses, sarcastic comments, and jokes. We also steal from other fictional stories.

Some people speak in movie quotes or song lyrics. Others will even cite their source before they parrot something they heard in the news or on a podcast. Let your fictional characters borrow from the real world and vice versa.

When they have a conversation, don’t be afraid to let them stutter or talk over each other, as long as the general message becomes clear. Use dashes and ellipses to mark these breaks, but don’t do it so often that these passages become clunky as I mentioned before.

Also, remember that people speak differently to different people. A cop is going to be gentler with a victim than a suspect. A waiter or cashier may be nicer to some customers over others, depending on their motivations.

A lot of our interactions are also now online. So, how we type messages to each other is another element to writing dialogue. Many modern stories are going to include some text or email exchange. And even that form of communication from person to person.

Final thoughts on dialogue

In the end, fiction is about trying to bring a story in your head to life. And when you have characters who sound like real people, you can really make the illusion work. These are the characters that resonate with us, and the lines that they they stay stick with us.

Also check out my post: “Creating a Great Narrator for your Novel.” 

Here are some of my favorite books with great dialogue:

Adult

Daisy Jones & The Six

World War Z

Red, White, & Royal Blue

Cry Wolf: A Tale of Beauty and the Beast

Turtles All the Way Down

Anna Incognito

Gone Girl

The Martian

Room

The Girls

YA

The Memory of Cotton

Rules of Falling

Living at Langster Motel

Victory Lap

The Hidden House

Flight of a Starling

The Catcher in the Rye

13 Little Blue Envelopes

A Corner of the Universe

The Fault in Our Stars

Middle Grade

Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great

Homecoming: The Tillerman Cycle #1

My Name is Layla

Sheltered: When a Boy Becomes a Legend

Simone LaFray and the Chocolatiers’ Ball

Harriet the Spy

Cody and the Fountain of Happiness

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Dear Mr. Henshaw

Maniac Magee

Night of the Twisters

What are your favorite books with realistic dialogue? Leave your answers in the comments below!

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