Want to Write Better Dialogue? Then Use My Tips in Your Novel!

Dialogue is so much more than your characters talking about their days. It’s an opportunity to grow your world by sharing their opinions on local politics or the excitement about exploring certain regions. It lets you shape a perspective for readers about the main antagonist, whether it’s explaining why they’re irredeemable or simply misunderstood.

You’ll be able to provide clues with dialect, slang, or accents to define a region or build the character of a city. Your dialogue has so much power that amateur writers easily overlook. Though with the right approach, you can use these moments of character interaction not only to tell but also to show something to your readers.

The Basics

When you approach your scenes, there are some necessities to keep in mind if you don’t want dialogue exchanges to become hum-drum and kill your novel’s flow.

Write With Intention

Every conversation has to have a goal for at least one of the characters involved or to provide some necessary information for the reader. Like I’ve said before, no one in your book should be talking for the sake of talking.

While it’s best to break up long narrative passages with dialogue and offer the reader’s eyes a break, make sure it has some meaning. Every line should be purposeful.

Conflict and Consequences Raise the Stakes

When your scenes are intentional for your characters, that it’s clear (or maybe not entirely clear…) that someone needs something, there’s bound to be conflict. Conflict is necessary to create room for growth in your book.

When there are struggles and desires at play, it reveals a lot about your cast and there are bound to be consequences for their actions or words in dialogue sequences. I talk about it more in my course, but that leads to raising the stakes.

Now, that doesn’t mean every conversation is life or death, but it still needs to matter. When something is at stake, you’re naturally creating tension, which will hook your readers.

What Do Your Characters Want?

Well-written dialogue that captures the above two tenets will shed light on your character’s desires. Obviously, you don’t want them to expound their whole lives by monologuing all the time. Still, if you choose their words, actions, or reactions carefully, it can illuminate who they are and how they feel about a given person, place, or thing.

Looking at the Details

With the basics of quality dialogue in mind, you’re already halfway towards writing better scenes. But to stand out further and really blow your reader’s minds, there’re little details you can keep in mind. Adding any or all of these theories can flesh out your characters and world even more throughout your story, bringing it to life.

Building Character

As I wrote above, desires, conflict, and consequences are products of writing with intent and will reveal details about your characters. But to take that a step further, consider a few more things that make people real.

• First, our relationships often define how most people interact. Most characters speak differently with their parents than their best friend or hated foe. By changing their word choices or making good use of dialogue tags, you can reveal what one person means to another. Like this character talking to their mom:

“Yes, mom! I’m working on my homework right now,” Sasha responded politely.

Versus their best friend:

“Ugh, Lily! I’ve got this mountain of homework from Mr. Stephenson’s class, and I think I might die…” Sasha groaned into the phone.

In these two very different exchanges, we’ve learned that Sasha’s mother expects obedience and that Sasha has a teacher named Mr. Stephenson, who gives a lot of homework and may be a character crucial to the story.

• Next, consider how you can use your descriptive dialogue or action tags to reveal body language and expression to tell something about your characters. So many people have nervous ticks or habits that give them away: Otherwise, we’d all be poker stars, am I right? Or, as I demonstrated above, we color our words with emotions depending on how we feel about something. Let’s take another look at Sasha’s life and what she can tell us about herself without words:

“Sasha, can you see me for a moment before you go?” Mr. Stephenson asked as the class started to file out of the room.

She slowly grabbed her things, wondering what she could have done wrong. “Sure.”

Everyone was gone, and she stood before her history teacher’s desk. “Did I forget part of the assignment?” Sasha absent-mindedly tugged at strands of her blonde hair, like she usually did when she was fretting.

Mr. Stephenson smiled warmly. “No, not at all.”

With a relieved sigh, Sasha’s hand let go of her hair. “Then what’s up?”

We learn here that she does have a nervous habit, and this exchange speaks to a lack of confidence in her schoolwork. And we also discover that, maybe, Mr. Stephenson isn’t all that bad.

One thing to keep in mind with your descriptive tags, though, is not to go crazy with them! You want to make them strong and use them wisely. The above example condensed a lot into one scene for these purposes, but I’d likely keep it simple for a few lines afterward. Otherwise, it’d kill the pacing, and the reader would start to “tone it out.”

Furthermore, watch out for redundancies. Someone can say, “Ugh!” or they can be described as groaning – not both!

• The last thing to cover here is power dynamics. Another key aspect of relationships that you can use the above two techniques to convey. Because let’s face it, hard as we try, we’re not all equal in this world. Some of us are naturally drawn to leadership or power, while others feel comfortable following and helping as a part of the whole. But those power dynamics need to come up to make compelling, real tension in your dialogue. Sasha has a few places in her life where this comes into play, like with her younger sibling:

“So, when you take the five apples, and you add three more apples, how many apples will the boy have?” Sasha quizzed Cheyenne. Since their parents didn’t get home from work until 6 o’clock, it was usually up to Sasha to help the first grader with her homework. They had a routine now, and the older sister came to look forward to it most days.

Her little sister’s brow furrowed in concentration while she counted on her fingers. “Uh…”

“You got this, Chey. Five…” Sasha prompted, “Plus 3…?”

Sudden inspiration lit the little one’s face. “Eight apples!”

“Yeah, nice work, Chey!”

The siblings exchanged a high-five before moving on to the next question.

But when she’s working with the captain of her lacrosse team.

Millie meant business, which is what made her a great captain. She was Sasha’s inspiration on the field. But now that Sasha was put on the spot, she was mortified. “You’re going to be on my wing for practice, Sasha.” The words rang in Sasha’s head.

She realized she hadn’t responded yet. “C-cool!’

“Show me what you’ve got, Sasha,” Millie said as if it was no big thing.

But it was a big thing. A huge thing. The team hadn’t even started to warm up, and Sasha was already sweating.

See the difference between these two moments? While Sasha seems cool, calm, and confident in helping her sibling, she is less assured when interacting with her idolized team captain. As far as we can tell, Millie isn’t a bully or anything, but her opinion clearly matters to Sasha. Playing with these dynamics exposes a lot about your characters and who they’re interacting with.

Readers Can Read Between the Lines

Subtext is the concept I mentioned above when characters might not make their intentions obvious. It’s a great hook and reveals crucial details about your character and story when you insert subtext into their dialogue or actions now and again.

When someone says one thing while meaning another or behaving contrarily, you strengthen a scene because it shakes things up for the reader.

Cut the Fluff

While you want to write real, genuine dialogue, you don’t need it to be too real. You can leave all the greetings aside (unless there’s something vital in that exchange) or make them part of the narrative.

You waste a lot of ink with every “Hello!” or “How are you?” your characters could exchange. In that vein, while the occasional speech may be necessary, you don’t want too many long-winded passages from your cast, either. To make an impact and keep readers engaged, get to the point.

Conversation Isn’t Always Polite

People aren’t always waiting for someone else to finish their sentence before jumping in. Also, people like to curse to get their point across or because that’s just who they are.

Making your dialogue messy is another place to make it real and insert further details about your character. Maybe they have impulse control? Perhaps someone isn’t well-educated or comes from the bad side of town? All of that information can come out in sequences like that.

Saying Things a Certain Way

The way your characters talk can reveal a lot about a specific place in your book or, like I said above, how they are raised. Using slang or putting in affectations helps to breathe life into your settings and make the general populace more exciting.

Plus, when you create a strong character choice with their “voice,” you can eschew the need for character tags in some places because it’s so obvious who is speaking. Get creative and develop your own colloquialisms and idioms to establish a sense of time and place to make your story stand apart.

And be sure to maintain consistency unless a circumstance, like a different power dynamic, changes how they might speak.

Some Last Tips

When it comes to understanding how authentic dialogue sounds, there are a few final things you may want to consider. Each of these activities and tips gives you an opportunity to learn about and strengthen your writing further.

Listen to Real Conversations

In my blog, I wrote about listening in on conversations to help you overcome writer’s block. While that doesn’t mean you should be eavesdropping on everyone’s private chat, it can help you pick up on the nuances of human interaction.

Pay attention to how they behave when speaking. Notice how their tone shifts depending on the topic. And see if they change anything when a new person or circumstance is introduced to the conversation.

Say It Out Loud

A tried and true method of determining if your dialogue sounds real is to speak it. When you or someone else hears it and plainly says, “Well, that doesn’t sound right,” it probably doesn’t. You can also use speech-to-text software if you don’t have someone else to work with.

It may not nail inflection, but you should be able to hear if dialogue sounds clunky. Or there’s always the good old-fashioned voice recorder, which almost every smart device has nowadays. However you go about it, listen carefully and be honest with yourself — your writing will be better for it.

First-Name Basis

Just because your characters know each other’s names doesn’t mean you have to use them in every line of dialogue. It sounds unnatural when they constantly address each other by name, especially if they’re the only two people in the conversation. Similarly, you need to find creative alternatives for your tags, too.

Don’t Say It All — Show It, Too

The adage “show, don’t tell” exists for a reason. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever throw exposition into your dialogue. But it would help if you did so sparingly.

Drip feed details about your story and world throughout to keep readers wanting more and excited for each tidbit of info you drop instead of frontloading into some grand speech. Which, I’ll remind you, rarely happens in reality, so why should it be in your book?

Coupled with the technical aspects from my last blog, all of these tips can make for more believable, grounded exchanges between your characters. Your book will flow, develop naturally, and have a stronger sense of place and purpose with each conversation.

Dialogue is a brilliant tool for writers, but a lot can go awry with so many ways to approach it. But with steady practice and careful observation, you can bring your characters to life in a way that will keep readers engaged.

Please check out my course and masterclass if you want to get more out of your writing. I’d also love to hear from you if you have any questions or suggestions about what you’d like me to write about in the future. Please find me on social media or write to me at jsims@jairesims.com.