Dialogue is a tricky beast.
Try to make it too realistic and all the messiness of real speech – the ums, the ahs, the backtracking – leaks in.
But swing too far the other way and it feels fake and unnatural.
That’s because there’s a balance: you need to strip real-life dialogue of its bad parts and infuse it with the best parts.
When you strike this balance, characters will leap off the page and feel real, and readers will be engaged in the story.
Here are four types of dialogue that, if you avoid, will strengthen your story and sharpen your voice.
Meandering dialogue
We’ve all had those conversations where half an hour in we think, How on earth did we even get here?
We divert, we lose track, we speak for the sake of speaking. In real life, this is normal. In fiction, it’s interference. Characters nearly always enter dialogue with an agenda.
When writing dialogue, think about what the character wants, their aim; is it to get information, to manipulate someone, to dump their burden? Don’t lead them astray. If they’re interrogating someone to find out who summoned a demon, they wouldn’t part-way ask the witness what they do for a living unless there’s a logical reason to do so (I’ve read this; there wasn’t).
Always keep in mind what the character wants during an interaction, which helps you answer the question ‘Would they really say this, now?’
This may sound contradictory to what I’ve just said, but small talk can serve a purpose: a character may need to bide time, or be nervous, or want to hide a secret. Then while the dialogue itself is mundane, the character’s thoughts aren’t – and it’s this contrast that creates tension.
Meandering dialogue also slows down pacing – if you want to know what else does (and how to fix them), I have a post for that.
Empty dialogue
Empty dialogue is conversations that don’t advance the plot, reveal character, create conflict, or (naturally, not info-dumpy) provide information.
It’s the Oh, how are you? and Nice day for some sword training, ain’t it! type of conversations. It’s the small talk and the idle chit-chat. It may be true to life, but readers don’t read for realism; they read for story.
Much of this shows up at the beginnings and ends of conversations where, in real life, we don’t get straight to the point – that’s plain rude! But just like the scene-structure advice ‘get in late, and leave early’, cut the politeness and pleasantries – if every bit of dialogue began with
‘Hi, how are you?’
‘Not bad, you?’
‘Yes, pretty great.’
‘Good to hear.’
‘So, I was just wondering…’
the book would be twice as long!
Let’s take a look at dialogue from the first scene in Tad Williams’ The Heart of what was Lost (only the dialogue, not the narrative exposition):
Porto: Where did you get that? That scarf?
Endri: My mother wove it for me. Piss off.
Porto: Are you really a Harborsider, or is your mother a bit blind?
Endri: What do you know about it?
Porto: More than you do, as it turns out, because I’m from the Rocks and we’ve been drubbing you lot at town-ball for centuries.
Endri: you’re a Sharo—a Geyser?
Porto: And you’re a Dogfish, dim as can be. What’s your name?
Endri: Tell me yours.
We know from this the names of their people and that there are tensions between them. Porto wants to know where Endri’s from (his agenda), while Endri deflects the questions to protect himself (his agenda). The dialogue also creates tension, as we don’t know yet whether this encounter will turn violent (advances plot).
Now for the first bit of dialogue from the next scene:
Duke Isgrimnur: I had hoped you might be exaggerating. But it is worse than I could have guessed.
Sludig: An entire village. No sense to it. Woman and children. Even animals.
Duke Isgrimnur (to Ayaminu): Well? What do you see? I see only murder. Your fairy cousins are murderers.
Ayaminu: The Hikeda’ya were stealing food. I doubt they would have bothered to harm anyone, but they were discovered.
Sludig: What of it? Do you make an excuse for them because they are your kin? I don’t care what you call them—Norns, White Foxes, or Hiki … what you said. Name them as you like, they are monsters! Look at these poor people! The war is over, but your immortal fairy cousins are still killing.
Ayaminu: My kind are not immortal, only long-lived. And as recent battles have shown, both my folk and our Hikeda’ya cousins can die. Thousands of them have done so in the past year, many at the hands of mortals like you.
Straight to the point. Conflict. Characterisation. Backstory. Interesting information – it has it all.
Readers don’t read for realism; they read for story.
Identical dialogue
People’s speech is influenced by so many things: experiences, education, location, fluency, health, cultural background, confidence, audience. The list goes on.
When I moved from Surrey to Stoke-on-Trent, I couldn’t for the life of me work out why I was being called ‘duck’. Turns out it’s a term of endearment, and I wasn’t being called a bird. I’d also noticed many people dropped ‘to’ in phrases like ‘give it me’. Does this mean they can’t speech proper English? Not at all; it’s a feature of regional dialect – preposition dropping – and it’s quite common.
But even those brought up in the same regions speak differently: there’s the classic case of scone (rhyming with cone or gone) or the many variations of a bread roll (bap, bun, barm cake).
Then there are a myriad reasons why someone will speak differently at different times – this is known as code-switching. They way they speak to their friends would differ from how they speak to their boss, which would differ from how they’d speak to their crush.
Know anyone who works in retail or an office? You probably won’t recognise them from their phone/customer service voice!
All this is to say that if your characters sound the same, there’s a problem: not only will it bore readers, but it’ll ruin their immersion in the story.
Try switching up your characters’ length of sentences, their word choices, their formality, and their vocabulary to better set them apart.
‘As you know, Bob’ dialogue
When characters say things they already know, clearly for the benefit of the reader, you have ‘As you know, Bob’ dialogue. You may think, Hey, this important info isn’t written as exposition, so that’s okay! But you’d be wrong: info-dumping in dialogue is still info-dumping. (Dialogue is only one way this creeps into your writing; here are three other ways to avoid info-dumping.)
A rather blatant example is a conversation between Sam and Igor in the video game Death Stranding:
‘Hard to imagine it now. As you can see, Death Stranding has poked us fulla holes, fucked us beyond all recognition, and if you were lucky enough to survive, the timefall came and washed you away. Then those freaks from the beach showed up. The worlds of the living and the dead all mixed together. And that’s when folks started holing up in the cities, porters like yourself put on a pedestal.’
Sam doesn’t need to be told any of this – he’s lived through those events! This isn’t something that a character would naturally say to someone who already knows the situation, destroying the illusion of a real conversation.
This technique can be used to slip in world-building information, too. But again, if the characters know what’s being discussed, the dialogue likely has no reason to exist. In the TV series Travelers, the time travellers have protocols they must abide by:
- The mission comes first
- Leave the future in the past
- Do not take a life; do not save a life, unless otherwise directed
- Do not reproduce
- In the absence of direction, maintain your host’s life
- Do not communicate with other known travellers outside of your team, unless sanctioned
A character breaking, or is considering breaking, a protocol, is usually accompanied by a team member shouting, ‘Hey, what about Protocol One!’ Or when a mission is over, the leader says ‘That’s our Protocol Five’, and they disband and return to their lives.
What they don’t do is explain the protocol: ‘Okay, that’s protocol Five, we’ve finished our mission, let’s go back to our lives and wait until we receive the next mission.’ They know the protocols off by heart.
Here’s what you can do instead:
- As James Scott Bell advises in How to Write Dazzling Dialogue: ‘Act first, explain later. Readers will wait a long time for explanatory material if there is solid action going on.’
- Include a newbie (either the POV character or someone they teach) who needs information explaining to – this way, the conversation will feel natural, not contrived
- Consider whether the information can be shown at a more relevant time – instead of someone explaining how magic works or how a ritual should be performed, can we see a character experimenting with magic or attend said ritual?
When characters say things they already know, clearly for the benefit of the reader, you have ‘As you know, Bob’ dialogue.
Final thoughts…
Ineffective dialogue is one of the biggest dampeners on any story, even if other elements are well done. It’s also one of the trickiest elements to master, but if you find your fiction is making one of the above mistakes, try the following:
- Remember dialogue is a polished, constructed version of real dialogue
- Focus on the characters’ motivations of their every interaction
- Use dialogue to advance the plot, create tension, reveal character, and naturally show information
- Get in late, and leave early – cut the politeness and pleasantries and get to the point
- Vary speech patterns and word choice as befitting the character’s experience, situation, education, and more
- Avoid having characters say things solely for the reader
Watch out for the second part to this post, where I’ll discuss four more types of dialogue problems.
