Writing Effective Dialogue

I recently posted on including action in dialogue-heavy scenes, but what about the dialogue itself? It’s a very tricky thing, but there are some basic guidelines:

1. Give your dialogue a purpose. Let me begin by saying that, as a writer, I often fall into the worst trap of dialogue-writing: including a line or a speech or—heck, let’s go for complete honesty here—an entire scene simply because it’s cute. It’s so tempting, when you come up with a funny, clever, or beautiful scene, to find a way to work it into your story. But no matter how good it is, if it doesn’t serve any kind of purpose in the story beyond making you feel clever, it’s out of place, and readers will know it. Every scene of dialogue (or action or narration for that matter) should advance the plot or tell us something about the characters.

2. Pay attention to how real people talk. Listen to your coworkers, friends, people on the street, and even politicians. Do they all talk the same way? Nope, and neither should your characters. While most people share general speech patterns, they don’t share similar vocabularies or syntax. It’s easy to recognize an inexperienced writer when all the characters sound the same; if you realize that your characters all sound like you, you have a problem. A hard-edged native New Yorker might use a phrase like “step on it,” while a Harvard professor would be more likely to say “Hurry, please.”

3. Pay attention to how real people talk. No, I’m not repeating myself. The flip side of the above coin is that there are some speech patterns we all share. Everyone uses contractions while speaking. Blame it on our rushed lifestyle, but we just don’t have the leisure to sound like Edith Wharton. People are more likely to say “It’s hot in here. Let’s go outside” than “It is hot in here. Let us go outside.” Furthermore, even the most dogged grammarian relaxes grammatical rules in speaking that he or she might never relax in writing. For example, we all end sentences in prepositions occasionally and we run words together (e.g., “gonna” instead of “going to”).
Another commonality is our tendency to let our emotions color our speech patterns. When we’re angry, we speak in short sentences. When we’re nervous, we speak quickly. When we’re uncomfortable, we tend to ramble.

4. Avoid dialect. Some of you may balk at this, and some of you probably should, because dialect done well can be engaging and illustrative (think Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison). But for the vast majority of authors, dialect is a mistake. Dialect, or regional speech distinguished by unique vocabulary and pronunciation, has pluses. It can add color to a work, and it certainly helps delineate a character. But if done poorly, it can seem belittling, alienating an entire region or race of people. Writing more than just a few lines of dialect demands the expertise of someone from the region—someone who is thoroughly familiar with all the colloquialisms, inflections, and meanings. If you don’t speak Spanish, you wouldn’t try to write in Spanish, right? So if you grew up in Connecticut, you probably shouldn’t attempt a novel chock-full of Southern dialect or one packed with Jamaican characters who say “mon” a lot.
Also remember that phonetic spelling and unfamiliar colloquialisms can become extremely irksome and slow the reader’s progress in the story. This doesn’t mean you can’t ever use dialect, but it should be used sparingly. You can always say that a character speaks with an accent, but that doesn’t mean you have to write with one.

5. Finally, learn how to punctuate dialogue correctly. Nothing identifies an inexperienced writer faster than misunderstanding the basic rules and mechanics of writing. Check out this helpful guide.

Whew! That’s a lot of advice, I know. But good dialogue is essential to good writing. It has the ability to make readers feel connected to the characters, to provide verisimilitude, to advance a story quickly and effectively, and, perhaps most importantly, to entertain.

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