Writing Dialogue

How to Write Good: A Writer's (Woefully Incomplete) Toolbox

I’m going to assume everyone here has at least a 5th grade Language Arts education, so I’m going to skip over most of the basics like where to put your commas and quotation marks. You know to start a new paragraph any time a different character is speaking, right? That’s pretty basic stuff.

Dialogue Tags

Let’s start with dialogue tags. My rule is—use as few as possible. One of my main goals overall, when it comes to writing fiction, is to use fewer words in general. Use good words—words that say more with less. And that applies to dialogue tags, which don’t add anything of value to the writing itself—they’re utilitarian, often necessary, but aren’t unique or original.

Dialogue tags let the reader know who said what. When there are two people talking back-and-forth, you only need to indicate who started off the conversation. You don’t have to keep adding I said, she said, I said, she said after each quote.

Take a look at this piece of dialogue from my WIP, Sleepers, between Hugo, the MC, and his daughter Ava:

“Stephanie’s having a birthday sleepover this weekend at La Paloma. Everyone’s getting spa treatments,” she said, wiggling her fingers.

“Spa treatments? What do her parents do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were you invited?”

“Yeah, but I told her I couldn’t go.”

“Why?”

“Because, dad. You can’t show up to a party without a gift. Hayleigh Brighton said she’s getting her a Marc Jacobs bag. Last year Stephanie took Vera Clark to see Billie Eilish.”

I nodded slowly as her problem became clear. “And you don’t want to show up with some cheap present.”

Ava stirred the noodles in her bowl. “We don’t even have enough for a cheap present.”

In this dialogue, the first tag establishes who started the conversation. The next line of dialogue starts with its own paragraph, so you know it’s the other person, and so on. It helps that in the middle, Ava says, “Because, dad.” In case you weren’t paying close attention to the back-and-forth, the speaker is addressing the other person by name—dad, so now you’re back on track. (Only do this if it sounds natural. We don’t always address each other by name when we speak, but in this case it works.)

Now if it’s a long piece of dialogue, you might want to add one or two tags here and there to help keep the reader on track. How long is long? Use your best judgement. But to be honest, if you have developed your character voice, you really shouldn’t have to. I’ll say more about that later.

I also tend to add bits of context to some of my dialogue tags so they’re not just a boring tag. In the example above, I added wiggling her fingers to elevate the dialogue tag with a bit of action. By this point, the reader knows that Ava, a surly 14-year-old, is quite sarcastic, so you can see her kind of making fun of the more privileged girls in her friend group with that little gesture. Saves me from having to use an adverb like sarcastically, ugh.

In lieu of a dialogue tag, you can place action on either side of the quote. I nodded slowly as her problem became clear, precedes the quote. This establishes who is speaking without needing a dialogue tag at all—it’s the one doing the action. Same with the action of Ava stirring her noodles, which implies the sad, introspective way she says what she says—acknowledging their poverty.

Of course, if there are more than two people, dialogue tags become more necessary. In this scene, Rafael is handing out special jerseys he’s ordered for a tug-of-war tournament they’re suppose to compete in at this festival.

“I’m not wearing this,” Piper says and tosses it back to Rafael.

“Piper, where’s your team spirit? I had these special ordered.”

“Come on, Pipe,” Theo pleads. “It’s just for the tournament.”

“Ugh, fine,” Piper huffs. “Give it here.”

Plot-Based Dialogue

Often times, dialogue serves the purpose of moving the plot forward. The author uses the characters to give the reader information without info dumping in the prose, which we’ve all been told is very very bad. We’re also told to show don’t tell, and putting plot-related information in the dialogue can be kind of a cheap workaround because it’s technically in the action.

Plot-based dialogue isn’t wrong. It’s better than info dumping for sure. But you have to make sure it sounds natural. This reminds me of that 1990 Massengill douche commercial. Two women, a mother and daughter, are out on a sailboat and the daughter asks her mom:

“Mom, do you ever feel, you know, not so fresh?”

The mom says, “Sure. That’s why I douche. But only with natural ingredients.”

“Who has natural ingredients?”

“Massengill. They have vinegar and water or baking soda.”

Why was this the example that popped in my head? I don’t have a good answer to that—sorry. But you see my point. It’s not a natural conversation. It’s fine in commercials, but often times authors need to get information to the reader and use their characters like commercial actors to convey that info. It can be super on the nose—more for the sake of the reader than for the other character.

Here’s some plot-based dialogue from my WIP. Lenny is highly suspicious of the Lunatech corporation that runs the sleeper program Hugo has signed up for. This is the first time we’re hearing about chip implants.

“I heard some things—about Lunatech.”

“What kind of things?”

“There’s this subreddit: r/sleepers. There’s this guy posting in there saying that Lunatech is implanting microchips inside the brains of sleepers.”

“That’s crazy. Why would they do that?”

Lenny gives me a condescending glare. He doesn’t have to explain. “Have you had any headaches?”

“No.” I neglected to mention that Darcy had.

“They said that’s a common thing with sleepers after their initial sleep study. That’s when they do the implant—while you’re unconscious. Let me see.” He stepped toward me to examine me closer. When he reached to touch my head, I pushed his hand away.

So, Lenny is telling Hugo what he’s heard, which is important for both Hugo and the reader to know. To Hugo, it’s just hearsay, but because he’s an unreliable narrator, the reader knows not to fully trust him and maybe Lenny isn’t as conspiratorial as Hugo believes he is. It helps move the plot forward, but hopefully, it sounds realistic—something Lenny would actually say to Hugo.

Character Voice

Each character should have their own unique voice. It helps to create character profiles for each of your characters (a topic for another Writer’s Toolbox?). You want to make sure they’re all unique, differentiated, and have their own personalities and characteristics. This includes how they speak.

One way to do this is to give your characters a catch phrase or maybe they use a certain word a lot. In Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut says, “So it goes” every time someone dies. He says it 106 times!

Maybe they have an accent or speak in a certain dialect that you can capture by spelling certain words the way the character says them. For example, in Tourist Trapped, Tobias Munch meets this little boy Finn in the in-between (where the dead go to learn how to let go of their bodies before entering the great beyond—so the kid is dead).

“Are you gonna swim wif the sharks?”

I spelled his words the way a lot of 7-year-olds speak, replacing th with f. Later, Tobias is telling Remy about the little dead boy and he wonders if he misses his parents back on Earth and Remy goes:

“I hate to say this, T, but you bummin’ me out.”

Remy is the only one who calls Tobias “T" and he speaks with an African American dialect. So even if you read this sentence out of context, you’d know who was speaking.

Three Levels of Dialogue

There are three levels of dialogue: direct, indirect, and summary.

Direct dialogue is going to comprise the bulk of all your dialogue. It’s the actual words your characters say to each other in quotes. All direct dialogue should be important enough that the reader actually needs to hear it.

For example, if two people are greeting each other, the reader doesn’t need to hear them saying Hi, how’s it going. Good, how are you? Boring. Start with the part that actually matters. You don’t need an example of direct dialogue. It’s the words you put in quotes.

Indirect dialogue is used when it isn’t that important to know exactly what the character said word for word. You want to convey that they said something but don’t need to spell it out or put it in quotes.

“Mr. Castillo, based on the toxicology results and witness testimony, I am placing you under arrest for driving under the influence and any related charges resulting from the crash. You have the right to remain silent . . .”

As he read me my Miranda rights, my mind spiraled.

The first part is direct dialogue. You’re hearing what the officer is saying up until You have the right to remain silent . . . We all know how Miranda rights go, so I don’t have to spell it all out. Hugo doesn’t even really hear it. He’s spiraling, not paying attention to the officer’s words. I’m using indirect dialogue to convey what is being said without having to put it on the page word for word.

Summary dialogue is even further removed from the speaking and is used to speed up the pace because the reader doesn’t need to know everything that was said and a summary will suffice. In Tourist Trapped, Mia travels to the in-between to visit Tobias (who is stuck up there). They have an amazing night but we don’t need to know everything they talked about so:

They talked for hours, walking along the beach, stopping only to watch the sunrise.

When you’re in love, you can stay up talking all night long—or so I’ve heard. Anyway, we don’t need to know all the details, just that it was an amazing night between two lovers—ew.

Subtext

Subtext is when a character says one thing but they mean something else or they hint at something without saying it outright. They don’t tell us what they’re thinking so the reader has to interpret some indirect message. This is how humans communicate a lot of the time, but it can be quite challenging to write. If you can write subtext without confusing your readers, hats off to you. That takes some skill.

Here’s a scene from Sleepers where Ava presents Hugo with a packet of information about a school field trip to New York that’s going to cost $3,000, money Hugo doesn’t have.

“Whatever. I already knew I couldn’t go,” Ava says, swiping the forms from my hand.

“Hey! You’re going to give me a paper cut. I didn’t say you couldn’t go.”

“It’s too expensive,” she says. “We can’t afford it.” She might as well have punched me in the gut.

“Let me see.” I hold out my hand and she shoves the papers back toward me with an eye roll. “I mean, yeah it’s a lot, but if it’s not until March—”

“The deposit’s due in December.”

I look closer. They want a thousand dollar deposit by December sixteenth. “That’s a month away!” What a time to expect large sums of money—right before Christmas.

“Told you. Whatever. It’s fine. Can we just go?”

Teenagers and their whatevers, am I right? Ava is always trying to protect her father’s ego, knowing how sensitive he is about their finances. So she acts like it doesn’t matter to her that she doesn’t get to participate with her peers in certain things, but we know it does, of course it does.

Read Aloud

The last thing I’ll say is that even if you follow all the “rules,” your dialogue still may sound stilted or lacking a certain authenticity. This is especially true with plot-based dialogue, and it can happen if you haven’t sufficiently developed your character voice.

The best way to test for this is to read it out loud. If you have someone around, you might ask them to read it back to you. Did it sound natural? Believable? Something as easy as using contractions, or dropping articles from your sentences. People do that when they speak. Your characters should, too.

So that’s all I have to say about dialogue. I hope you found some of this useful. Happy writing, nerds!