Top 5 Tips For Writing Engaging Dialogue
One of the things that can kill your story faster than anything else is terrible dialogue. I know this from personal experience and my own mistakes. Dialogue is how you will establish a lot about the characters you are writing and it has to be believable or else it won’t be immersive. As such, I’ve come up with five great tips on how to make your dialogue as engaging as possible.
Tip Number One:
Study the speech patterns of real people, multiple people.
One of the things that has helped me to write dialogue the most is listening to other people talk. Paying attention to the inflections they use or even the accent they have. Every person has a unique way of speaking. If all of your characters “sound” the same or have the same tone then it’s going to be very hard to tell them apart.
An easy way to do this is to watch a show you like. Specifically one where you like multiple characters. Watch how they interact. Listen to how they speak. Think about your own characters and if any of them might sound similar or even the same.
If your character has an accent, study the speech patterns of characters or people from that country to see how they speak. Really get into the tone and cadence until you can hear their voices in your head when you write out the dialogue.
Tip Number Two:
Read the dialogue out loud after you write it
You don’t have to do this for all the dialogue you write, at least not eventually. However, when I started to write I did read a lot of it back to myself out loud. I tried to figure out if it sounded like something a person might actually say. Of course, you do have to take into consideration the type of character you are writing and what you are trying to portray so it won’t be the same all the time but it does help.
Sometimes you may write a sentence of dialogue that appears to work on paper but when reading it back you realize how clumsy it is. You can even find a friend or two to read dialogue back to you so you aren’t affected by your own bias. If you are too embarrassed to share work with friends or family, an artificial voice may work in a pinch but since they never sound too human to begin with that wouldn’t be my go-to solution, just my last resort. It’s better than nothing, after all.
Tip Number Three:
Show don’t tell
The last thing anyone wants is a bunch of story dumping via dialogue. If you can avoid this, then please do, at all costs. Yes, there are occasions where a character needs to explain something that has happened to them or explain a plan of action. However, if you can minimize this in any way you should. As important as dialogue is to a story, showing action and writing out descriptions is going to be a lot better.
Think about if you really have to have a character explain their entire life story to another character or if you can show their personality through behavior and action. Keep in mind, a lot of things can be implied and the human mind is a wonderful thing. People can fill in the blanks and figure things out themselves. On top of all that, dropping bits and pieces of lore while moving the story along will keep the reader wanting to find out more. You want a bit of mystery in every character you write, no matter what genre.
Tip Number Four:
Grammer can take a back seat
Though there are some people who walk around speaking in a very proper grammatically correct way, the vast majority of people don’t. Especially in a casual conversation. People use slang. People mess up words. People use the wrong words when they don’t know any better. Depending on the dialect or tone some words may have letters removed at the end like “Ridin” instead of “Riding”. People use words like ain’t and y’all.
If the conversation is casual and the character isn’t a professor or professional then you don’t have to worry about how proper they are speaking (unless that’s one of their character traits). I do have a few characters who are very frigid and speak only with proper English but that’s just how they are. The vast majority of my characters don’t. Deciding how your characters speak and what words they have different inflections on will help shape their personality.
Tip Number Five:
He said, she said
This is a tip that I wish I’d known well before now but I’m sharing it here for others who may be struggling. You don’t have to put “he said” or “she said” (or whatever preferred pronoun you choose) after each character speaks. It’s already implied who is talking and what they are doing. The only time this may get confusing is if you have multiple people speaking in one scene. However, if you have gotten good enough with dialogue you may not need to differentiate as the tone should continue to imply who’s speaking. Especially if your story is only written from one character’s point of view.
For example:
“There’s no way in hell I’m going to do that,” Cordelia said.
“Do you really think I was giving you a choice?” Avery asked.
“Choice or not, I’m not doing it. You can’t make me.” She answered.
“I’m the one in charge here, not you. You’re going to do as I say and you’re going to do it now.” He demanded.
Can you see how clunky that gets? You don’t need to add any qualifier for who is speaking after the first time they speak. You also don’t need to add any other description for speaking like, replied, whispered, yelled, giggled, cried, etc. All of this should be implied from the tone of the conversation. So that conversation above would be improved as:
“There’s no way in hell I’m going to do that,” Cordelia said.
“Do you really think I was giving you a choice?” Avery asked.
“Choice or not, I’m not doing it. You can’t make me.”
“I’m the one in charge here, not you. You’re going to do as I say and you’re going to do it now.”
If you want to spice things up a bit more to make it engaging beyond just the conversation you can add actions after the dialogue, since it’s already known that they are speaking with the quotations before and after the words.
“Choice or not, I’m not doing it, you can’t make me.” She folded her arms over her chest as she continued to stare him down.
“I’m the one in charge here, not you,” He reached out and gave her a firm shove with the flat of his hand, “You’re going to do as I say, and you’re going to do it now.”
Whatever you choose to do, make sure that it fits the natural flow of the story and the tone of the dialogue that you are attempting to convey.
Conclusion:
Though there are many different techniques, tricks, and tips for writing dialogue (and there isn’t a completely right or wrong way to do it) these would be my tips. I have found quite a bit of success following these methods and I hope that they can help anyone who may be struggling on this topic.
