Dialogue is a powerful tool. It gives your readers a chance to hear the characters speaking, efficiently revealing aspects of their personality and inter-personal relationships that are difficult to show in narrative.

Something you quickly learn if you read and write fiction, though: realistic dialogue isn’t easy to write, and even great writers sometimes get it wrong. If you’re looking for ways to enhance your dialogue, here are some tips that can help.

Tip #1: Transcribe real speech.

Back in the day, when I was in music school, my jazz teachers would have me learn solos by ear. The goal wasn’t just to figure out the notes other musicians played but to capture and mimic the nuances of their style and, by doing so, learn what makes their sound distinctively theirs.

Writers can do the same thing and, thanks to the internet, these days you don’t even have to be a coffee shop creeper to do it. There are millions of hours of people talking on YouTube, not to mention all the on-demand content most people can stream onto their phone or TV, and any of it could be a prime candidate for transcription for the right kind of project. 

There’s so much stuff out there it can be a challenge deciding what to transcribe. If you want to write more natural, authentic dialogue, you’ll be best-served transcribing unscripted content, ideally something that features people in conversation rather than a single person talking to a camera.

Reality TV can actually be incredibly valuable for this. You can argue the extent to which these shows are “real” but they’re meant to seem real, and the way the characters talk to each other reflects this. You can also find this kind of natural conversation on talk shows and in some documentaries.

On the other hand, if you want to write tighter, snappier dialogue, you can learn a lot from transcribing scripted shows and movies. If you’re trying to write dialogue for a specific character, think of someone who’s like them in film or TV and transcribe their lines. If you’re going for more general improvement, pick a show or movie that you think has excellent dialogue and use this as a chance to identify what makes it so effective.

Whatever your source material, don’t just transcribe the subtitle version. Do a true, full transcription. Include their “ums” and filler words, their false starts and mid-sentence tangents, the places they pause or hesitate—you can even include notation for when they talk with their hands, or how they use gestures or facial expressions to enhance or change the meaning.

Doing this kind of close listening and transcribing forces you to actively pay attention to the way people speak in a way most of us don’t when we go about our day-to-day lives. Ultimately, that’s the goal of transcription—not the words you write on the page, but the way doing so develops your ear for natural speech so you can replicate it for your characters.

 

Tip #2: Remember who the character is talking to.

There’s a trope of bad dialogue that’s so pervasive it’s got its own name: the “As you know, Bob…”. Most commonly found in sci-fi (though it can pop up in any genre), this is when a character explains things to a character who already knows them.

Really, of course, this is the author talking to the reader. The problem is, if the conversation doesn’t make sense within the context of the story, it kills the suspension of disbelief. The reader now is too fully aware they’re being told a tale because real-world humans don’t just go around saying things like “Hello, my estranged brother whom I haven’t talked to in ten years since our parents died without a will and we fought over our inheritance …” or “As you and I both remember from our time working together as geneticists, the purpose of this new device is…”

Now, the advice I often see in response to this is “don’t use dialogue to convey information to the reader.” For me, that’s throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Dialogue is an excellent place to share info with the reader—you just need to remember who the person’s speaking to, and what they would and wouldn’t know. 

Let’s go back to that first awful sentence as an example: “Hello, my estranged brother whom I haven’t talked to in ten years since our parents died without a will and we fought over our inheritance.”

This is bad dialogue for a number of reasons, but one of them is that the brother—the audience for the dialogue—knows all of these facts already. In a real-world conversation, this knowledge would inform both siblings’ speech, but it would be more indirect. They might make snarky references to the fight, or may be over-polite and speak around it. Even if they addressed the fight, they wouldn’t talk about these summary details. They might rehash old arguments, or try to explain their motivations, or maybe apologize and try to make amends—in short, they’d be focused on their relationship and the emotions connected to it.

That’s the first way to smoothly insert info for the reader in dialogue: to put it in the context of the characters’ relationships, motivations, or emotions. If the info you want to drop is that they haven’t talked in 10 years, you could say something like, “You don’t talk to me for ten years and now this?”—the info being dropped there is something the brother knows, yes, but it’s being brought up for emphasis. There is a logical, in-world reason why one character is telling another something they already know.

The other option is to introduce a character who doesn’t know the full story. If a character is receiving new information along with the reader, this creates that in-world logic for why it’s being shared in dialogue. This is most effective when that information introduces tension, advances the plot, or prompts the character to act, make a decision, or otherwise advance their arc. 

Going back to our estranged siblings, let’s make the brother a newlywed and put his new spouse in the scene. Now, there’s an outsider who can ask questions and is invested in the answers. Maybe the brother never talked about the fight and this interaction prompts a shift in the couple’s relationship, or maybe the version of events the spouse has heard doesn’t match up with the truth—there are a lot of ways to take it. And that’s the point. When the information is new and valuable for the character, that adds conflict and movement to the story, letting you bring the reader up to speed without them feeling like they’re being info dumped at.

 

Tip #3: Use actions and gestures in place of dialogue tags to bring a scene to life.

What’s inside the quotation marks isn’t the only thing that affects how natural (or not) a conversation reads. Pace and rhythm are important aspects of conversation because they indicate the emotional state of the speakers. Think about the contexts in which you’re likely to have fast-paced, back-and-forth conversations. For most people, it’ll be when you’re excited, nervous, stressed, or angry—some kind of strong, high-energy emotion. 

Sometimes, that’s the effect you want in a dialogue passage. If so, back-and-forth dialogue, occasionally marked with a tag (e.g. “I said”) for clarity, will achieve it. When you want to portray a more relaxed conversation, though, sprinkling in a bit of narrative slows down the pace. A great way to do this is to show what the characters are doing while they’re talking, or during conversation pauses.

There are other benefits to interspersing action into your dialogue, like:

• It keeps the scene grounded. Extended dialogue passages can start to feel a bit floaty for the reader. Showing the characters interacting with their world keeps the reader immersed in the story and can prevent longer conversations from feeling disconnected.
• It keeps the scene in motion. Dialogue can be useful for building characters and emotions, but it’s also static. Long dialogue passages often steal momentum from a story, especially if the two characters are just sitting in a room talking. One way to bring that back is to have characters talk while they’re in motion—maybe literally en-route from one place to another, or going about a task, even if it’s mundane.
• It breaks up the rhythm of dialogue tags. A lot of writers feel self-conscious about repeating “said” over and over. Replacing a few of these tags with an expression, gesture, or action breaks up the rhythm, preventing dialogue from reading as repetitive without resorting to distracting synonyms.
• It rounds out your characters. People often show as much of themselves through body language as the words they say. You can use that in your fiction, making characters more three-dimensional by describing the unique expressions, hand movements, nervous ticks, etc. they pepper into their conversations.

The more narrative you insert between lines of dialogue, the more leisurely the pace of the conversation will be. Dialogue that’s meant to read as fast-paced should have sparing narrative interjections, though it still needs a few for the reasons mentioned above—it keeps the scene grounded, maintains momentum, and helps the characters who are talking feel more like real, breathing people. Even otherwise well-written dialogue is likely to start reading artificial if it feels like it’s happening in a vacuum.

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