5 min read

How to Write Dialogue That Isn't Just People Talking

Dialogue is not conversation. What characters want, what they refuse to say, and the punctuation and attribution rules that keep the reader inside the scene.

Record a real conversation and transcribe it. It will be unreadable: false starts, repetitions, three people talking about nothing for ninety seconds because nobody wants to raise the actual subject.

Now notice that last part. Because nobody wants to raise the actual subject. That's the only bit of realism worth stealing.

Dialogue is not conversation. It's conversation with the boring parts removed and the pressure turned up.

The engine: two people who want different things

A scene of dialogue works when the characters want incompatible things and both are trying to get them through the conversation itself.

If they want the same thing, they cooperate, and cooperation is not drama. If they want nothing, they exchange information, and the reader can feel you moving the plot with your hands.

So before writing a line, answer two questions. What does each person want from this exchange? And: what would each of them rather not say?

The second question is where all the good dialogue lives.

Subtext, which is the whole craft

People do not say what they mean. They approach it, retreat from it, attack it sideways, and talk about the car instead.

"You didn't call." "The signal's bad at the site." "For three days." "It's a big site."

Nobody mentions the marriage. Everyone in the room, including the reader, understands the subject is the marriage. Every line is about the missing calls and none of them is about the missing calls.

The rule that follows: if a character says exactly what they feel, either they are in extremis, or you have written a placeholder. On-the-nose dialogue is almost always a first draft telling you what the scene is about. Keep the information; delete the sentence that states it.

Attribution: say "said" and stop worrying

The advice to vary your dialogue tags — she opined, he expostulated, they riposted — is the single worst piece of writing advice in wide circulation.

Said is invisible. Readers' eyes pass over it the way they pass over punctuation, which is exactly what you want: nothing between the reader and the voice. A tag that draws attention to itself is a tag doing the line's job because the line couldn't.

Three practical rules:

Said and asked cover more than 95% of attributions. Use them.
Adverbs on tags ("Get out," she said angrily) tell the reader what the line already conveyed. If it didn't convey it, fix the line.
Action beats beat tags. Instead of a tag, give the speaker something to do: "Get out." She turned the tap on and left it running. This attributes, characterises, and paces, all at once.

And drop the attribution entirely when two people are talking and it's clear who's speaking. Long tag-free exchanges accelerate; readers can hold about four or five lines before they need a hand-hold.

Voice: how do you know who's speaking?

Cover the tags. If you can't tell your characters apart, they don't have voices — they have your voice, distributed.

Voice is not accent, and it is not verbal tics (a character who says "innit" is not characterised, they are labelled). Voice is:

What they notice, which is what they care about.
How much they say. Some people answer a question with a paragraph. Some answer with "Mm."
How they handle silence. Who fills it? Who lets it sit? Whoever needs the other person more usually speaks first.
What they never say. The word a character avoids characterises them more than the words they use.

Mechanics, briefly

These trip up more drafts than they should.

New speaker, new paragraph. Always. It's how readers track a conversation without tags.
Comma before the tag, inside the quotes: "I'm leaving," she said.
Full stop when there's no tag: "I'm leaving." She picked up the bag.
A question mark or exclamation mark replaces the comma but keeps the lowercase tag: "Are you leaving?" she asked.
Interruption gets an em dash. Trailing off gets an ellipsis. They are different: one is cut off from outside, one fades from within.
Dialect: spell it correctly and let word choice and rhythm carry the accent. Phonetic spelling ("Ah dinnae ken") exhausts readers and, when the phonetic character is the poor one, patronises them.

Where dialogue goes wrong

The information delivery. Two characters explaining to each other what they both already know, so the reader learns it. As you know, Bob… If they both know it, they wouldn't say it. Find someone who doesn't know, or cut it.

The agreeable scene. Everyone gets along, the conversation goes where it should. Cut the scene, or find who's lying.

The unbroken exchange. Fifty lines with no interiority, no gesture, no room. Dialogue is what people say; a scene is what happens while they say it.

Everyone answering the question they were asked. Real people deflect. So should yours, and the deflection tells us who they are.

Here is the compression of all of it: write down what the scene is about, then forbid anyone from saying it.

Narrale's Character lens reads your chapters and reports where voices have converged, which characters do all the talking, and where a scene resolved without anyone wanting anything. The Writing lens catches the adverb-laden tags. Neither writes a line for you — the thing your characters refuse to say is the one part of this that cannot be automated.