Dialogue Writing: How to Make Characters Sound Like People

Dialogue is one of the easiest things to write badly and one of the hardest things to write well. Bad dialogue stops a story dead. Great dialogue is invisible — readers don't notice they're reading it; they just feel they're inside a real conversation. The craft is in the gap between transcription and distillation.

Real speech is mostly unprintable

Record a real conversation and transcribe it. You'll be horrified. Real speech is full of false starts, irrelevant tangents, 'um,' 'like,' 'you know,' and circular phrasing. Printed verbatim, it's unreadable. Dialogue in fiction is real speech stripped of noise, sharpened for character, and engineered to do at least two things at once.

Every line should do multiple jobs

The best dialogue lines do at least two of the following at once: reveal character, advance plot, deliver information, create tension, or land a laugh. Lines that only do one job are wastes of space. Lines that do three or four are the lines readers remember. This is the discipline behind great screenwriting.

Subtext is everything

Characters rarely say exactly what they mean. They imply, deflect, dodge, and signal. The reader's job is to fill in the gap; the writer's job is to leave the right-sized gap. Dialogue without subtext reads like a transcript of a customer service call. Dialogue with subtext reads like life.

Tags: keep them small

'Said' is invisible to readers and almost always the right choice. 'She exclaimed,' 'he muttered,' 'they hissed' — most of these are noise. If you need to convey how a line is delivered, do it through the line's content or the surrounding action, not a fancy tag. Strunk and White were right about this one.

Distinct voices, on purpose

If you can't identify who's speaking from the line alone — without the tag — your characters share a voice. Give each character a small set of verbal habits: a sentence rhythm, a favorite metaphor, a refusal to use certain words. These can be subtle. They just have to be consistent.

Exposition is a dialogue trap

When characters explain things to each other that they would obviously already know — 'as you remember, your father, the king of this kingdom, died in the war ten years ago' — you've fallen into the As You Know trap. Find another way. Have characters disagree about the facts. Have them mention only what's relevant in the moment. Trust the reader to catch up.

Read it out loud

The fastest way to find bad dialogue is to read it aloud. Lines that feel fine on the page often clunk in the mouth. If you stumble reading it, your characters will too. Almost every great dialogue writer reads their work out loud during revision; many do it during drafting.