Good dialogue is one of the very most crucial elements in a novel. Great dialogue can make a novel sing. Bad dialogue can sink it like a stone. Here are seven ideas on how to write good dialogue.
UPDATED 5/24/19
Good dialogue is not weighed down by exposition
When the dialogue is carrying exposition and trying to tell the reader too much, characters end up saying a lot of very unnatural and unwieldy things. You’ll see things like:
“Remember that time we stole the frog from Miss Jenkins and she ended up giving us two hours of detention and that’s how we met?”
“Yeah, totally! And now we’re in 6th Grade and have to dissect frogs for our science project, which is due tomorrow. I don’t know how we’re going to get it finished in time.”
So much of this dialogue would already be already apparent to the characters. They’d know how they met without having to talk about it, they’d know they’re in 6th grade without having to talk about it, they’d know the science project is due without talking about it. So it’s very clear to the reader that they’re not talking to each other: they’re really talking to the reader.
Exposition and dialogue only really mesh when one character genuinely doesn’t know what the other character is telling them and it’s natural for them to explain at the moment they’re explaining it. Otherwise, if you’re just trying to smush in info, your reader is going to spot it a mile away.
Good dialogue has a purpose and builds toward something
Sometimes you’ll see characters in novels bantering back and forth in a way that is meant to reveal character or fill space. Unless it’s just so insanely unbelievably clever that the writer makes it work, usually this feels hollow and, well, boring.
A good conversation is an escalation. The dialogue is about something and builds toward something. If things stay even and neutral, the dialogue just feels empty.
Characters in a novel never just talk. There’s always more to it.
Good dialogue evokes the way people actually talk in real life without actually sounding precisely like the way people talk in real life
Paraphrasing Elmore Leonard, good writers leave out the boring parts. This goes doubly for dialogue: it’s usually best to cut to the chase rather than spending time on the pleasantries that normal people use in everyday conversation.
In real life our conversations wander around all over the place, and a transcribed real life conversation is a meandering mess of free association and stutters. In a novel, a good conversation is focused and has a point.
And in a novel, dialect, slang, and voice is used sparingly. Just a hint of flavor is enough. As my former client Jennifer Hubbard wrote, “good dialogue sounds like conversation, but is not an exact reproduction of conversation.”
Good dialogue reveals personality, and characters only very rarely say precisely what they are thinking.
Human beings are not very articulate creatures. Despite all the words at our disposal, words tend to fail us at key moments, and even when we know what we want to say we spend a whole lot of time trying to describe and articulate what we feel without being quite able to do it properly. We misunderstand, overemphasize, underemphasize, grasp at what we mean, and conversations go astray. So when two characters go back and forth explaining precisely what they are feeling or thinking to each other, it doesn’t seem remotely real.
Good dialogue is instead comprised of attempts at articulation. There’s a whole lot that is kept back, because we humans only rarely really truly put our true feelings out there.
Now, this shouldn’t be taken too far and a conversation shouldn’t be an endless string of misunderstandings (unless you’re Samuel Beckett), but the way in which characters express their feelings and how they articulate what they’re feeling is one of the most important ways of revealing character. Are they reserved? Boisterous? Do they bluster? Hold back?
Characters who say exactly what they mean are generic. Characters who talk around their emotions and objectives are much more interesting.
Good dialogue goes easy on the exclamations and exhortations
When a character overuses “Ughs” and “Blechs” they can easily sound petulant. When they overuse exclamations, they can exhaust the reader with their excitability. When they overuse verbal tics and crutches, they can drive the reader crazy.
Interjections and grunts are kind of like carpet cleaning concentrate. They must be diluted or you’ll burn a hole in the floor.
Good dialogue is boosted by dialogue tags, gestures, and action, so the reader can easily follow who is saying what
Poor maligned dialogue tags!!! Out there on the Internet it has lately become trendy for people to advocate stripping books of dialogue tags so that the person who is speaking is solely apparent through gestures and context.
This is overkill. Get behind me, dialogue tags, I will defend you until the end!
As long as you mainly stick to said and asked, your reader won’t notice they’re there, and they’ll be way better able to track who is saying what. Yes, don’t overdo dialogue tags and look for ways to add meaningful gesture and action to back and forths, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The key on the gesture and action is not to simply use it to break up the dialogue for pacing purposes, but to actually make it meaningful, which is hard to do.
Good dialogue is unexpected
There’s nothing worse than reading a stretch of dialogue where the characters are saying precisely what we think they’re going to say.
The best dialogue counters our expectations and surprises us.
“Vladimir Putin!”
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Art: The Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
…I knew you were going to say that.
Also: gesundheit
Terrific post! Really wonderful, Nathan. I'll re-read this when I write. Very helpful.
And may I say how funny you are. Loved your exposition in #1.
I struggle most with #3. That's tricky – to write in a believable way but not true to life. I'm working on that.
I'm pretty good a #7, though. #7 is fun! 🙂
Did I say this was good? This is good – thank you!
I like to strip out all the attributions, show who's talking in a way that doesn't call too much attention to itself, then add "said" and "asked" back in when it's necessary for clarity. I've judged some contests locally and seen many people use "she said" and "he said" and "he asked" connected to every bit of dialogue, in addition to using other expressions. Very distracting.
thank you for this one nathan! you make things so easy to understand. you've completely helped me with my dialogue woes! 🙂
As for this: "Characters who say exactly what they mean are generic. Characters who talk around their emotions and objectives are much more interesting." So true, and a great way to put it.
I think one of the most interesting things about the way we humans communicate is the disconnect between what we think and what we say – and the major impact it has on our lives. It's one of the main concepts I try to explore in my writing.
I find that narrating how I see people act in movies helps with writing dialogue. That way you can really see how you don't have to 'say' how someone feels, you just have to describe their movements, which in turn, let us know how they feel.
Personally, I write the dialogue first, and I do it with screenwriting software so I'm not tempted to add in the action except in sparse amounts.
If you want to write decent dialogue, you have to be a better than decent listener. Movies are your friend. Find a character who "sounds" like the one you want to portray, listen to the flow of their words for a couple of hours until you can superimpose the voice from the movie onto your own character, then let him/her talk.
For example: I find using Cate Blanchet's voice from LoTR works exceptionally well for writing fantasy characters. There's a distant, enchanted tone to the words, and a specific cadence that aids that detachment from the normal "human" conversation.
If you want understated "snark", drag out a few British comedies and get the rhythm right.
Dialogue at its best should sound like music in your head, with you the conductor of the orchestra. You have to figure out which notes blend together.
(And for the love of Pete, please don't write out accents. It makes me want to hit things with sticks.)
Ideally, you should know who's talking without having to be told, just as you'd recognize the voice of a friend on the phone without seeing their face.
Wow. I found this most useful and also a little disheartening – as if I know nothing about this writing thing I have a dream of taking on. But, I will have fun and carry forth, keeping all the technical stuff in mind. Question: Do writers have fun while trying to remember the countless technicalities we are supposed to know? Did the really great authors know all the techinicalities? I just want to write! (pout)
"Don't throw out the baby with the bath water." That is an excellent line which really belongs in story dialogue somewhere. Excellent points all around, Nathan.
This would be a good time for a dialogue contest!
Dialogue sets the scene when I'm writing. It's where I usually start, then I add the other elements. It works for me.
I prefer books with dialogue and dialogue tags, rather than straight narrative which I might skim over.
Once again, I like your style, Nathan, as you defend the dialogue tags!!
Great post.
"Good dialogue is boosted by dialogue tags, gestures, and action, so the reader can easily follow who is saying what."
I'm glad you posted this explanation. I hope people take it seriously.
I also think it's important when you're in the editing stage to look at dialogue and see if it's really necessary. In other words, if the dialogue can be eliminated and worked into a descriptive paragraph it *sometimes* works better and makes the novel move faster.
And balance between description, narrative, and dialogue is important.
I have this theory, and I could be wrong, that people don't use dialogue tags because most don't know how to use them.
They figure it's just easier to not use them and play it safe.
Grrrreat Post.
"Eight days a week are not enough to show I care!"
josin-
I feel like movies can be both friend and foe of the novel writer. I agree that a lot can be learned from movies as so much depends on the script, but at the same time, when people write with a movie in mind they can sometimes end up relying too much on dialogue to carry the scene rather than focusing on the action and emotions. The result is that the novel can end up reading more like a screenplay than a novel.
Swampfox – a dialogue contest? FUN!
True.
It helps that I started with screenwriting before novel writing. You have to learn to tune out the movie and just hear the voices, if that makes any sense at all. (listen, as opposed to watch)
;-P
Great post. I am going to post it on the fridge. Even better, I am going to eat it.
Hey Nathan,
I agree with your take on good vs. bad dialog, but I am still trying to figure the whole going from scrub writer to published writer thing out. What has been scaring me the most lately is the dialog that I have been adding to my novel is more to make it longer than to add to the story. The story is already there, the plot is in place, the characters are defined and strong, but the word count is lighter then the average bear. To battle this I have been going through and adding additional tidbits and dialog. I am just scared that I am getting to a point that I am taking something that worked and destroying it just to make it longer and marketable. Any thoughts?
M.A. Leslie
Great post! I'm like Josin, I listen to movie dialogue a lot but my agent called me on it and said it read like a screenplay (but a darn good one). lol
(BTW – Love the Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir. Saw the original in the Phillips Collection. Makes you wonder what they were saying while they were gettin' their eat on. lol)
I tend to err on the side of too realistic and too meandering when it comes to dialogue. Which is fine by me. Ever since I read WHAT'S EATING GILBERT GRAPE, I've been convinced this can be done very well.
My main gripe with dialogue, and what I think can make it read as very false, is when characters respond too directly to what the other one says. In real life, people don't listen well. They've already formulated most of what they're going to say before they've heard the other person's side of the conversation.
People in books pay too much attention to each other. In real life, people just want to hear themselves talk.
Adding elements of that realism to dialogue can really make it more interesting, I've found.
I LOVE good dialog. Perhaps better than anything. I also think this is all good advice.
I am, however, not in the "only said" camp. I told you why the linked article.
hannah-
Good thoughts. I think my perspective in this post is probably skewed a bit because I write genre fiction, and hopefully people will take this post with a grain of salt as such. There's much more room for meandering and realistic dialogue in more literary works. I wouldn't advocate stripping that away, because in many literary works the verisimilitude is what makes it work.
You can't take away my exclamation marks! I need them!
!!!
This is excellent and very apposite to my needs. Thank you so much!
Yes x 7! Fantastic post.
#7 very eye opening am going to write some unexpected dialogue in my MS and see how it turns out
Love this! (Now this is uber helpful and necessary. *wink*)
So I was formulating a post on dialogue. :scraps it and points everyone here:
This is why I always start my first draft with the dialog, and spend my edits cutting the dialog down to find the real meat underneath. Dialog makes or breaks books that I read and write. There is a reason it's called dialog instead of conversation.
Although, on occasion, when I let my characters say exactly what they want to, I myslef end up surprised by the insights I find.
Great stuff Sir Bransford, but you forgot something:
Musicality/Rhythm…
Not to be overused, but not to be forgotten!
Effective fiction dialogue is what we'd like to imagine our real-life dialogue to be, but never is.
For a fun exercise, I tried to come up with an example that showed every point.
Version 1
“Hey, there’s a big green dragon swooping down on us. You know, that one you just woke up by poking it with your stupid sword?"
“I see him, yay, and forsooth, whoa, and gosh-darn-it, you are correct.”
“You know, cough… cough… sorry – pretzel stuck in my throat – um, what was I saying? Oh yeah, this is odd ‘cause I heard dragons are not usually active this time of year.”
“I believe such behavior stems from their reptilian nature. I’ve seen it in lizards as well.”
“I’m scared. What shall we do about this?”
“Perhaps we should run.”
Version 2
“Oh, frack!" said Pippin. "That dragon’s on our ass!”
Bilbo stared up at the clouds, where the monstrous form soared down like a demon. “Crap!”
Pippin ran for the forest. “You woke him up! You deal with him!”
Bilbo patted his vest, his pants… “Oh, come on, magic ring… c’mon…”
Great article, its going into my favorites!
Bad dialogue, particularly of the #1 variety, grates on me more than most other writing issues because I hear dialogue while reading more clearly than I hear narration. When it doesn't sound right, it breaks the dream that good fiction creates.
One question/observation, and maybe you just covered this with your literary fiction caveat, Nathan, but D.H. Lawrence's dialogue in WOMEN IN LOVE struck me as… lingering and surprisingly centered around ideas more than typical book conversations. I wasn't bored by it, but I hadn't before seen such time spent on long passages of dialogue where the conflict is mostly in differing opinions rather than something more central to the present action. Sometimes I think my own dialogue scenes run long, or that my characters wax philosophical too much, but then I think of Lawrence… Maybe it worked then and wouldn't work as well now? Just curious about your/anyone else's thoughts on this.
Used to like writing dialogue, but now it's definitely a thorn in my side because, IMO, it's the easiest spiral-out-of-control element when writing scenes. Keeping dialogue tight, while assigning character, flavor, and plot takes far more effort than I once believed.