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How to Write Dialogue — Examples, Tips & Techniques

E very screenwriter wants to write quippy, smart dialogue that makes the page sparkle and keeps the actors inspired. But how do you do it? There are dozens, if not hundreds, of lists and guides that provide useful tips for how to write dialogue in a story. In this post, we’ll look at dialogue writing examples, examine a few tried-and-true methods for how to write good dialogue, and provide you with all the best dialogue writing tips. 

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How to Write Dialogue Format

1. study dialogue writing.

A good first step is to look to accomplished writers to see how they became skilled at how to write dialogue . But we have to know what we’re looking for. You can start by reading some dialogue examples from different mediums or practice with some dialogue prompts .

Writer-director Quentin Tarantino is as famous for his dialogue as he is for breaking the rules of screenwriting. Sure, to be able to craft dialogue that is so compelling it becomes a set piece unto itself, a la Tarantino, may be a good aesthetic model. 

But trying to emulate his more stream-of-consciousness approach to dialogue writing may prove disorienting. Check out our video below and see if you notice anything that stands out about his approach to writing dialogue.

Tarantino Dialogue  •   Subscribe on YouTube

Though Tarantino doesn’t necessarily write according to plotted out script templates, and he probably doesn't adhere to proper dialogue format all the time. His creative choices might be largely unconscious, and his secret weapon in how to write a good dialogue may be his well-developed characters. 

He knows who his characters are and what they want, and the characters’ desires shape his dialogue writing.

And as we will see when we look at other screenwriters’ methods, character is everything in how to write dialogue in a script. 

Tarantino on set

As the old adage goes, learning the rules in order to break them can make you a stronger writer – and in this case, we want to look at some of the best writing dialogue rules. 

Writing from a structure can help make sure you don’t lose the thread of your story by getting too caught up in crafting clever, flashy dialogue that doesn’t connect to anything.

And, a good structure can provide the perimeters for your writing to flow within, so you don’t have to pause to remember fifteen different rules of how to do dialogue!  

How to Write a Good Dialogue 

2. make your character's wants clear.

In a post about how to approach how to write dialogue it may seem contradictory to say this, but a good rule for dialogue writing in a scene is to write the dialogue last. 

After building out the other elements of your story (your arcs, acts, scenes, and story beats) you will have a better sense of how each scene connects to the larger unfolding of the story and, most importantly, what each character wants in a given scene. 

You may not need a “how to write good dialogue format” if you always keep in mind your larger story arc, how each scene drives the story forward, and what character motivations are in every scene. 

An iconic dialogue scene from The Social Network

A good starting place in thinking about how to write dialogue in a script is to remember that in a screenplay, dialogue is not mere conversation. It always serves a larger purpose, which is to move the story forward. 

The function of dialogue can be broken down into three purposes: exposition , characterization , or action. If we’re always clear on the larger purpose of a scene and we know each character’s motivations, we know what our dialogue is “doing” in that scene. 

When we know what a character wants, we don’t have to worry as much about how to write dialogue because the motivations of the characters drive what they say. See our post on story beats to dig into story beats, which help illuminate what each character wants, and when they want it.

Functions of Dialogue

Exposition (to relay important information to other characters) 

Characterization (to flesh out who a character is and what they want)

Action (to make decisions, reveal what they’re going to do)

The famous diner scene from Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally is an excellent example of both exposition and characterization, critical components of how to write dialogue between two characters. Here's a breakdown we did of the iconic When Harry Met Sally screenplay .

The ongoing question of the film, and of Harry and Sally’s relationship, is whether heterosexual women and heterosexual men can really be platonic friends. Every other character in the film and their issues (the friend in an affair with a married man, the friends who are in a happy couple and getting married) all support the driving dilemma of the film: the desire to partner and escape the presumed suffering of dating. 

Take a look at the scene:

When Harry Met Sally

Underneath this question of whether men and women can be friends is the subtext that they may ultimately end up together after all. The overriding question of the film is, after knowing each other, “how come they haven’t already?” The diner scene teases out the idea of sexual tension in a supposedly platonic friendship, raising the stakes. 

Here's a breakdown of subtext.

The Art of Subtext  •   Subscribe on YouTube

Remember, though the scene depicts Harry and Sally having a conversation in a diner, the words they are speaking are not mere “conversation” – it is dialogue written to sound like a natural conversation. There is a difference. 

Each word in Ephron’s dialogue writing has a purpose. Sally says she is upset about how Harry treats the women he dates and that she’s glad she never dated him (underscoring the ongoing conflict of the film). 

Harry defends himself, saying he doesn’t hear any of them complaining (alluding to how he wouldn’t disappoint her, either). When Sally suggests the women he dates might be faking orgasm, Harry doesn’t believe her.

This prompts her to fake an orgasm right there in the diner to make her point (ratcheting up the primary conflict, while also providing some comic relief). 

You can read the scene, which we imported into StudioBinder’s screenwriting software , below:

When Harry Met Sally script

This scene works so well because it serves a crystal clear purpose in driving the story forward. 

Great dialogue writing examples always drive the plot from one scene to the next. You may not like plotting out your story beats, thinking about story arcs in a methodological way, or approaching how to write dialogue between two characters systematically at all. 

Just remember, most professional screenwriters do, and Writing Dialogue rules might be an instance where it is worth learning the rules in order to break them. Check out more great dinner scenes to inspire how to tackle this awkward but important type of scene!

How to Write Dinner Dialogue  •   Subscribe on YouTube

How to write dialogue in a script , 3. give your dialogue purpose.

Finally, we’ve come to our favorite part. The lines. Famed playwright and screenwriter David Mamet says great dialogue boils down to this one concept:

“Nobody says anything unless they want something.” 

— David Mamet

This handy motto is one of the best dialogue writing tips, if not the only one you need. This principle encapsulates what many other rules of dialogue writing are getting at. What they want also may not be spoken aloud, which is where writing internal dialogue comes in handy.

The advice to use as few words as possible, to cut the fat, to arrive late and leave early, to write with subtext in mind, to show rather than tell – all of those goals can be met by keeping the focus on what the characters want. 

David Mamet at work

If they don’t want anything, they don’t need to say anything. If you have a clear idea of who your characters are, and what the function of each scene is in the story, then your characters' agendas, conflicts, and obstacles, and their manner of speaking to express themselves, can come forward more naturally.

If you know what your characters want, you may find that you know how to write dialogue in a story very naturally! 

And yet, there is a caveat here: Screenwriter Karl Iglesias warns that it can be easy to have the character saying what you , the writer, want, not what they , the character, want. 

Below is a playlist from our 4 Endings video series where we look at how "wants and needs" play out in a screenplay.

Wants vs. Needs  •   Watch the entire playlist

Because what you , the writer, want them to do is of course to carry some part of the story for you. So another important tool to put in your toolbox of dialogue writing tips is to always zoom in on the character , and stay tuned into what they want at any given point in the story. 

Check out the last scene from Mamet’s  Glengarry Glen Ross , a film based on the screenplay, also by Mamet, and a gold standard of excellent movie dialogue. 

Mamet’s principle that each character has to show what they want is demonstrated brilliantly in the final scene. At the beginning of the film, everyone at a New York City real estate office learns all but the top two salesmen will be fired in two weeks. 

Levene (Jack Lemmon) is a salesman who wants to keep his job and survive. In the final scene, Williamson (Kevin Spacey) accuses Levene of stealing leads from the office. By this final scene, what Levene wants has shifted. Now he wants to convince Williamson of his innocence.

Take a look:

                                                                                                   Final Scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, 1992

Dialogue writing examples  , 4. edit and focus the dialogue.

Now it’s time to sculpt the general arc of your story into form – and the minimalist principles of how to write dialogue in a story can help bring your vision to life. 

You want to cast a harsh light on your text in order to whittle down everything you’ve written. Make sure every last word really needs to be there. You want to yank anything that gets in the way of telling the great story you want to tell. That way, the lines will be focused, compelling, and inspire great actors to want to bring them to life. 

Remember: We’re not yanking lines if they’re not sparkly or punchy enough, we’re yanking them if they don’t serve a purpose. 

Even the cutest remark can actually be clutter, and even the more mundane lines can play a vital role by elucidating our character’s motives, the conflict they’ve encountered, and where the story is going next. The more dialogue writing examples you read, the more you’ll see how the characters’ motivations are driving not only what is said, but how it is said. 

Related Posts

• 22 Essential Screenwriting Tips →    
• What is a Story Beat in a Screenplay? →
• FREE: Search StudioBinder’s Database of Film & TV Screenplays →

Another approach for how to write great dialogue in a script is to read through every line of the script aloud to make sure it flows naturally. 

You could also try putting your hand or a piece of paper of the names of the characters. Can you tell who is saying what? 

If each character doesn’t have a discernible way of speaking, revisit your character development and really define who this person is, what they want, and all their quirks and characteristics. Then revamp their lines to make all of that come to the forefront in each line. And when in doubt, revisit dialogue writing examples from your favorite movies and shows to get the juices flowing. 

Another tip for how to properly write dialogue is to scan your script for “dialogue dumps.” The best way to avoid “As you know, Bob…” information dumps in your dialogue is to let the characters bat pieces of information back and forth. Check out our video on exposition below:

How to write good exposition  •   Subscribe on YouTube

Let them reveal bits of it over time, scattered throughout a scene like breadcrumbs. Let them argue about it, challenge what each other knows. Do they already know it, or are they wrestling with it?  

Assess your dialogue to make sure what you’re trying to accomplish with a line of dialogue couldn’t better be said with an action, an adjustment to scene or setting, a facial expression, or some other nonverbal detail. 

The “Good to See Another Brother” scene from Get Out is a great example of keeping the dialogue minimal and letting facial expression, costume, and tone convey the information: 

Get Out screenplay

At this point in the story, Chris still thinks he is simply one of the few black people in his white girlfriend’s upper middle class white family and their social circle. 

We, the audience, still might think we’re watching a rom com that conveys only a mild awareness of race, somewhere off in the background of the story. But in this scene, race starts moving forward as a central plot point. 

Chris approaches Andre, because he wants to feel a sense of connection in an isolating environment. In order to convey layers of social anxiety and racial tension, all that Jordan Peele needs is the line, “It’s good to see another brother around here.”

Throughout the film, Peele exemplifies how spreading information out like bread crumbs can help build tension and curiosity about a scene. 

Jordan Peele on the set of Get Out

Look at how much room Peele leaves in the script to describe how Andre’s character should convey his response (“soft-spoken,” “no trace of an urban dialect”). This helps load every word in the scene with more weight and purpose. When Andre does speak, his words are few.

He has visibly changed his style and manner of speaking since Chris first saw him, he won’t say much, and has a glazed over expression on his face. All of this raises the stakes: What is going on here? 

Get Out still

In order to learn how to write dialogue, one of the most important writing dialogue rules is to stay in touch with where your characters are in the story at all times. 

Building your story, your character arcs, and your story beats before writing can help provide a structure that will give your writing a container in which to flow. Developing compelling characters and making sure that every bit of dialogue real estate on the page is devoted to serving a function in your screenplay can help streamline the whole dialogue writing process.

But regardless of which method you use, if anything, just remember the Mamet Motto: “Nobody says anything unless they want something.” 

Up Next 

How to introduce your characters.

Writing great dialogue is the icing on the cake of a great story. The importance of building out your story and really being clear on where we’re going, who wants what, and what the conflicts and motivations are the foundation beneath all the other writing dialogue rules. But having solid character descriptions is only the first step. You also have to give each one a great entrance. Check out our post to get some tips on how each compelling, amazing character you write can make their grand entrance. 

Up Next: Introducing Characters →

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How to Write Dialogue: 7 Great Tips for Writers (With Examples)

Hannah Yang

Great dialogue serves multiple purposes. It moves your plot forward. It develops your characters and it makes the story more engaging.

It’s not easy to do all these things at once, but when you master the art of writing dialogue, readers won’t be able to put your book down.

In this article, we will teach you the rules for writing dialogue and share our top dialogue tips that will make your story sing.

Dialogue Rules

How to format dialogue, 7 tips for writing dialogue in a story or book, dialogue examples.

Before we look at tips for writing powerful dialogue, let’s start with an overview of basic dialogue rules.

• Start a new paragraph each time there’s a new speaker. Whenever a new character begins to speak, you should give them their own paragraph. This rule makes it easier for the reader to follow the conversation.
• Keep all speech between quotation marks . Everything that a character says should go between quotation marks, including the final punctuation marks. For example, periods and commas should always come before the final quotation mark, not after.
• Don’t use end quotations for paragraphs within long speeches. If a single character speaks for such a long time that you break their speech up into multiple paragraphs, you should omit the quotation marks at the end of each paragraph until they stop talking. The final quotation mark indicates that their speech is over.
• Use single quotes when a character quotes someone else. Whenever you have a quote within a quote, you should use single quotation marks (e.g. She said, “He had me at ‘hello.’”)
• Dialogue tags are optional. A dialogue tag is anything that indicates which character is speaking and how, such as “she said,” “he whispered,” or “I shouted.” You can use dialogue tags if you want to give the reader more information about who’s speaking, but you can also choose to omit them if you want the dialogue to flow more naturally. We’ll be discussing more about this rule in our tips below.

Let’s walk through some examples of how to format dialogue .

The simplest formatting option is to write a line of speech without a dialogue tag. In this case, the entire line of speech goes within the quotation marks, including the period at the end.

• Example: “I think I need a nap.”

Another common formatting option is to write a single line of speech that ends with a dialogue tag.

Here, you should separate the speech from the dialogue tag with a comma, which should go inside the quotation marks.

• Example: “I think I need a nap,” Maria said.

You can also write a line of speech that starts with a dialogue tag. Again, you separate the dialogue tag with a comma, but this time, the comma goes outside the quotation marks.

• Example: Maria said, “I think I need a nap.”

As an alternative to a simple dialogue tag, you can write a line of speech accompanied by an action beat. In this case, you should use a period rather than a comma, because the action beat is a full sentence.

• Example: Maria sat down on the bed. “I think I need a nap.”

Finally, you can choose to include an action beat while the character is talking.

In this case, you would use em-dashes to separate the action from the dialogue, to indicate that the action happens without a pause in the speech.

• Example: “I think I need”—Maria sat down on the bed—“a nap.”

Now that we’ve covered the basics, we can move on to the more nuanced aspects of writing dialogue.

Here are our seven favorite tips for writing strong, powerful dialogue that will keep your readers engaged.

Tip #1: Create Character Voices

Dialogue is a great way to reveal your characters. What your characters say, and how they say it, can tell us so much about what kind of people they are.

Some characters are witty and gregarious. Others are timid and unobtrusive.

Speech patterns vary drastically from person to person.

To make someone stop talking to them, one character might say “I would rather not talk about this right now,” while another might say, “Shut your mouth before I shut it for you.”

When you’re writing dialogue, think about your character’s education level, personality, and interests.

• What kind of slang do they use?
• Do they prefer long or short sentences?
• Do they ask questions or make assertions?

Each character should have their own voice.

Ideally, you want to write dialogue that lets your reader identify the person speaking at any point in your story just by looking at what’s between the quotation marks.

Tip #2: Write Realistic Dialogue

Good dialogue should sound natural. Listen to how people talk in real life and try to replicate it on the page when you write dialogue.

Don’t be afraid to break the rules of grammar, or to use an occasional exclamation point to punctuate dialogue.

It’s okay to use contractions , sentence fragments , and run-on sentences , even if you wouldn’t use them in other parts of the story.

This doesn’t mean that realistic dialogue should sound exactly like the way people speak in the real world.

If you’ve ever read a court transcript, you know that real-life speech is riddled with “ums” and “ahs” and repeated words and phrases. A few paragraphs of this might put your readers to sleep.

Compelling dialogue should sound like a real conversation, while still being wittier, smoother, and better worded than real speech.

Tip #3: Simplify Your Dialogue Tags

A dialogue tag is anything that tells the reader which character is talking within that same paragraph, such as “she said” or “I asked.”

When you’re writing dialogue, remember that simple dialogue tags are the most effective .

Often, you can omit dialogue tags after the conversation has started flowing, especially if only two characters are participating.

The reader will be able to keep up with who’s speaking as long as you start a new paragraph each time the speaker changes.

When you do need to use a dialogue tag, a simple “he said” or “she said” will do the trick.

Our brains generally skip over the word “said” when we’re reading, while other dialogue tags are a distraction.

A common mistake beginner writers make is to avoid using the word “said.”

Characters in amateur novels tend to mutter, whisper, declare, or chuckle at every line of dialogue. This feels overblown and distracts from the actual story.

Another common mistake is to attach an adverb to the word “said.” Characters in amateur novels rarely just say things—they have to say things loudly, quietly, cheerfully, or angrily.

If you’re writing great dialogue, readers should be able to figure out whether your character is cheerful or angry from what’s within the quotation marks.

The only exception to this rule is if the dialogue tag contradicts the dialogue itself. For example, consider this sentence:

• “You’ve ruined my life,” she said angrily.

The word “angrily” is redundant here because the words inside the quotation marks already imply that the character is speaking angrily.

In contrast, consider this sentence:

• “You’ve ruined my life,” she said thoughtfully.

Here, the word “thoughtfully” is well-placed because it contrasts with what we might otherwise assume. It adds an additional nuance to the sentence inside the quotation marks.

You can use the ProWritingAid dialogue check when you write dialogue to make sure your dialogue tags are pulling their weight and aren’t distracting readers from the main storyline.

Sign up for your free ProWritingAid account to check your dialogue tags today.

Tip #4: Balance Speech with Action

When you’re writing dialogue, you can use action beats —descriptions of body language or physical action—to show what each character is doing throughout the conversation.

Learning how to write action beats is an important component of learning how to write dialogue.

Good dialogue becomes even more interesting when the characters are doing something active at the same time.

You can watch people in real life, or even characters in movies, to see what kinds of body language they have. Some pick at their fingernails. Some pace the room. Some tap their feet on the floor.

Including physical action when writing dialogue can have multiple benefits:

• It changes the pace of your dialogue and makes the rhythm more interesting
• It prevents “white room syndrome,” which is when a scene feels like it’s happening in a white room because it’s all dialogue and no description
• It shows the reader who’s speaking without using speaker tags

You can decide how often to include physical descriptions in each scene. All dialogue has an ebb and flow to it, and you can use beats to control the pace of your dialogue scenes.

If you want a lot of tension in your scene, you can use fewer action beats to let the dialogue ping-pong back and forth.

If you want a slower scene, you can write dialogue that includes long, detailed action beats to help the reader relax.

You should start a separate sentence, or even a new paragraph, for each of these longer beats.

Tip #5: Write Conversations with Subtext

Every conversation has subtext , because we rarely say exactly what we mean. The best dialogue should include both what is said and what is not said.

I once had a roommate who cared a lot about the tidiness of our apartment, but would never say it outright. We soon figured out that whenever she said something like “I might bring some friends over tonight,” what she meant was “Please wash your dishes, because there are no clean plates left for my friends to use.”

When you’re writing dialogue, it’s important to think about what’s not being said. Even pleasant conversations can hide a lot beneath the surface.

Is one character secretly mad at the other?

Is one secretly in love with the other?

Is one thinking about tomorrow’s math test and only pretending to pay attention to what the other person is saying?

Personally, I find it really hard to use subtext when I write dialogue from scratch.

In my first drafts I let my characters say what they really mean. Then, when I’m editing, I go back and figure out how to convey the same information through subtext instead.

Tip #6: Show, Don’t Tell

When I was in high school, I once wrote a story in which the protagonist’s mother tells her: “As you know, Susan, your dad left us when you were five.”

I’ve learned a lot about the writing craft since high school, but it doesn’t take a brilliant writer to figure out that this is not something any mother would say to her daughter in real life.

The reason I wrote that line of dialogue was because I wanted to tell the reader when Susan last saw her father, but I didn’t do it in a realistic way.

Don’t shoehorn information into your characters’ conversations if they’re not likely to say it to each other.

One useful trick is to have your characters get into an argument.

You can convey a lot of information about a topic through their conflicting opinions, without making it sound like either of the characters is saying things for the reader’s benefit.

Here’s one way my high school self could have conveyed the same information in a more realistic way in just a few lines:

Susan: “Why didn’t you tell me Dad was leaving? Why didn’t you let me say goodbye?”

Mom: “You were only five. I wanted to protect you.”

Tip #7: Keep Your Dialogue Concise

Dialogue tends to flow out easily when you’re drafting your story, so in the editing process, you’ll need to be ruthless. Cut anything that doesn’t move the story forward.

Try not to write dialogue that feels like small talk.

You can eliminate most hellos and goodbyes, or summarize them instead of showing them. Readers don’t want to waste their time reading dialogue that they hear every day.

In addition, try not to write dialogue with too many trigger phrases, which are questions that trigger the next line of dialogue, such as:

• “And then what?”
• “What do you mean?”

It’s tempting to slip these in when you’re writing dialogue because they keep the conversation flowing. I still catch myself doing this from time to time.

Remember that you don’t need three lines of dialogue when one line could accomplish the same thing.

Let’s look at some dialogue examples from successful novels that follow each of our seven tips.

Dialogue Example #1: How to Create Character Voice

Let’s start with an example of a character with a distinct voice from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling.

“What happened, Harry? What happened? Is he ill? But you can cure him, can’t you?” Colin had run down from his seat and was now dancing alongside them as they left the field. Ron gave a huge heave and more slugs dribbled down his front. “Oooh,” said Colin, fascinated and raising his camera. “Can you hold him still, Harry?”

Most readers could figure out that this was Colin Creevey speaking, even if his name hadn’t been mentioned in the passage.

This is because Colin Creevey is the only character who speaks with such extreme enthusiasm, even at a time when Ron is belching slugs.

This snippet of written dialogue does a great job of showing us Colin’s personality and how much he worships his hero Harry.

Dialogue Example #2: How to Write Realistic Dialogue

Here’s an example of how to write dialogue that feels realistic from A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.

“As much as I love this land, some days I think about leaving it,” Babi said. “Where to?” “Anyplace where it’s easy to forget. Pakistan first, I suppose. For a year, maybe two. Wait for our paperwork to get processed.” “And then?” “And then, well, it is a big world. Maybe America. Somewhere near the sea. Like California.”

Notice the punctuation and grammar that these two characters use when they speak.

There are many sentence fragments in this conversation like, “Anyplace where it’s easy to forget.” and “Somewhere near the sea.”

Babi often omits the verbs from his sentences, just like people do in real life. He speaks in short fragments instead of long, flowing paragraphs.

This dialogue shows who Babi is and feels similar to the way a real person would talk, while still remaining concise.

Dialogue Example #3: How to Simplify Your Dialogue Tags

Here’s an example of effective dialogue tags in Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

In this passage, the narrator’s been caught exploring the forbidden west wing of her new husband’s house, and she’s trying to make excuses for being there.

“I lost my way,” I said, “I was trying to find my room.” “You have come to the opposite side of the house,” she said; “this is the west wing.” “Yes, I know,” I said. “Did you go into any of the rooms?” she asked me. “No,” I said. “No, I just opened a door, I did not go in. Everything was dark, covered up in dust sheets. I’m sorry. I did not mean to disturb anything. I expect you like to keep all this shut up.” “If you wish to open up the rooms I will have it done,” she said; “you have only to tell me. The rooms are all furnished, and can be used.” “Oh, no,” I said. “No. I did not mean you to think that.”

In this passage, the only dialogue tags Du Maurier uses are “I said,” “she said,” and “she asked.”

Even so, you can feel the narrator’s dread and nervousness. Her emotions are conveyed through what she actually says, rather than through the dialogue tags.

This is a splendid example of evocative speech that doesn’t need fancy dialogue tags to make it come to life.

Dialogue Example #4: How to Balance Speech with Action

Let’s look at a passage from The Princess Bride by William Goldman, where dialogue is melded with physical action.

With a smile the hunchback pushed the knife harder against Buttercup’s throat. It was about to bring blood. “If you wish her dead, by all means keep moving," Vizzini said. The man in black froze. “Better,” Vizzini nodded. No sound now beneath the moonlight. “I understand completely what you are trying to do,” the Sicilian said finally, “and I want it quite clear that I resent your behavior. You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it quite ungentlemanly.” “Let me explain,” the man in black began, starting to edge forward. “You’re killing her!” the Sicilian screamed, shoving harder with the knife. A drop of blood appeared now at Buttercup’s throat, red against white.

In this passage, William Goldman brings our attention seamlessly from the action to the dialogue and back again.

This makes the scene twice as interesting, because we’re paying attention not just to what Vizzini and the man in black are saying, but also to what they’re doing.

This is a great way to keep tension high and move the plot forward.

Dialogue Example #5: How to Write Conversations with Subtext

This example from Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card shows how to write dialogue with subtext.

Here is the scene when Ender and his sister Valentine are reunited for the first time, after Ender’s spent most of his childhood away from home training to be a soldier.

Ender didn’t wave when she walked down the hill toward him, didn’t smile when she stepped onto the floating boat slip. But she knew that he was glad to see her, knew it because of the way his eyes never left her face. “You’re bigger than I remembered,” she said stupidly. “You too,” he said. “I also remembered that you were beautiful.” “Memory does play tricks on us.” “No. Your face is the same, but I don’t remember what beautiful means anymore. Come on. Let’s go out into the lake.”

In this scene, we can tell that Valentine missed her brother terribly, and that Ender went through a lot of trauma at Battle School, without either of them saying it outright.

The conversation could have started with Valentine saying “I missed you,” but instead, she goes for a subtler opening: “You’re bigger than I remembered.”

Similarly, Ender could say “You have no idea what I’ve been through,” but instead he says, “I don’t remember what beautiful means anymore.”

We can deduce what each of these characters is thinking and feeling from what they say and from what they leave unsaid.

Dialogue Example #6: How to Show, Not Tell

Let’s look at an example from The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. This scene is the story’s first introduction of the ancient creatures called the Chandrian.

“I didn’t know the Chandrian were demons,” the boy said. “I’d heard—” “They ain’t demons,” Jake said firmly. “They were the first six people to refuse Tehlu’s choice of the path, and he cursed them to wander the corners—” “Are you telling this story, Jacob Walker?” Cob said sharply. “Cause if you are, I’ll just let you get on with it.” The two men glared at each other for a long moment. Eventually Jake looked away, muttering something that could, conceivably, have been an apology. Cob turned back to the boy. “That’s the mystery of the Chandrian,” he explained. “Where do they come from? Where do they go after they’ve done their bloody deeds? Are they men who sold their souls? Demons? Spirits? No one knows.” Cob shot Jake a profoundly disdainful look. “Though every half-wit claims he knows...”

The three characters taking part in this conversation all know what the Chandrian are.

Imagine if Cob had said “As we all know, the Chandrian are mysterious demon-spirits.” We would feel like he was talking to us, not to the two other characters.

Instead, Rothfuss has all three characters try to explain their own understanding of what the Chandrian are, and then shoot each other’s explanations down.

When Cob reprimands Jake for interrupting him and then calls him a half-wit for claiming to know what he’s talking about, it feels like a realistic interaction.

This is a clever way for Rothfuss to introduce the Chandrian in a believable way.

Dialogue Example #7: How to Keep Your Dialogue Concise

Here’s an example of concise dialogue from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

“Do you blame me for flunking you, boy?” he said. “No, sir! I certainly don’t,” I said. I wished to hell he’d stop calling me “boy” all the time. He tried chucking my exam paper on the bed when he was through with it. Only, he missed again, naturally. I had to get up again and pick it up and put it on top of the Atlantic Monthly. It’s boring to do that every two minutes. “What would you have done in my place?” he said. “Tell the truth, boy.” Well, you could see he really felt pretty lousy about flunking me. So I shot the bull for a while. I told him I was a real moron, and all that stuff. I told him how I would’ve done exactly the same thing if I’d been in his place, and how most people didn’t appreciate how tough it is being a teacher. That kind of stuff. The old bull.

Here, the last paragraph diverges from the prior ones. After the teacher says “Tell the truth, boy,” the rest of the conversation is summarized, rather than shown.

The summary of what the narrator says in the last paragraph—“I told him I was a real moron, and all that stuff”—serves to hammer home that this is the type of “old bull” that the narrator has fed to his teachers over and over before.

It doesn’t need to be shown because it’s not important to the narrator—it’s just “all that stuff.”

Salinger could have written out the entire conversation in dialogue, but instead he kept the dialogue concise.

Final Words

Now you know how to write clear, effective dialogue! Start with the basic rules for dialogue and try implementing the more advanced tips as you go.

What are your favorite dialogue tips? Let us know in the comments below.

Do you know how to craft memorable, compelling characters? Download this free book now:

Creating Legends: How to Craft Characters Readers Adore… or Despise!

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Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction writer who writes about all things strange and surreal. Her work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, The Dark, and elsewhere, and two of her stories have been finalists for the Locus Award. Her favorite hobbies include watercolor painting, playing guitar, and rock climbing. You can follow her work on hannahyang.com, or subscribe to her newsletter for publication updates.

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Writing dialogue in a story requires us to step into the minds of our characters. When our characters speak, they should speak as fully developed human beings, complete with their own linguistic quirks and unique pronunciations.

Indeed, dialogue writing is essential to the art of storytelling . In real life, we learn about other people through their ideas and the words they use to express them. It is much the same for dialogue in fiction. Knowing how to write dialogue in a story will transform your character development , your prose style , and your story as a whole.

We’ve packed this article with dialogue writing tips and good examples of dialogue in a story. These tools will help your characters speak with their full uniqueness and complexity, while also helping you fully inhabit the people that populate your stories.

Let’s get into how to write dialogue effectively. First, what is dialogue in a story?

Inner Dialogue Definition

Indirect dialogue definition.

• How to Write Dialogue: Elements of Good Dialogue Writing

How to Write Dialogue in a Story: 4 DOs of Dialogue Writing

• How to Write Dialogue in a Story: 4 DON’Ts of Dialogue Writing

9 Devices for Writing Dialogue in a Story

Dialogue writing exercises, how to format dialogue, what is dialogue in a story.

Dialogue refers to any direct communication from one or more characters in the text. This communication is almost always verbal, except for instances of inner dialogue, where the character is speaking to themselves.

Dialogue definition: Direct communication from one or more characters in the text.

In works of Fantasy or Science Fiction, characters might communicate with each other telepathically or through non-human means. This would also count as dialogue in a story.

The importance of dialogue in a story cannot be overstated. The words that characters speak act as windows into their psyches: we can learn lots about people by what they say, as well as what they omit.

Additionally, dialogue allows for the exchange of information, which will advance the story’s plot. Any story that involves conflict between two or more people must involve dialogue, or else the story will never reach its climax and resolution.

Inner dialogue is a form of communication in which a character speaks with themselves. This is, essentially, a form of monologue or soliloquy . Inner dialogue allows the reader to view the character’s thoughts as they happen, transcribing their doubts, ideas, and emotions onto the page.

Inner dialogue definition: a form of communication in which a character speaks with themselves.

Inner dialogue can also be a memory or reminiscence, even if the character is not consciously speaking to themselves. If the narrator shows us a memory that the character is currently thinking about, then that character is still offering something to the narrative by means of unspoken conversation.

It is not necessary for any story to have inner dialogue. However, if you plan to use dynamic characters in your writing, then it probably makes sense to show the reader what that character’s inner world looks like. Developing complex, three dimensional characters is essential to telling a good story, which requires us to have some sort of window into those characters’ minds.

Indirect dialogue is dialogue, summarized. It is not put in quotes or italics; rather, it neatly sums up what a character said, without going into detail.

Indirect dialogue definition: dialogued, summarized.

In other words, we don’t get to see  how the character said something , we are only told what they said. This is useful for when the information is better summarized than told in excruciating details, because the narrator wants to get to the important dialogue, the dialogue that introduces new information or reveals important aspects of the character’s personality.

Haruki Murakami gives us a great example in  Kafka on the Shore :

I tell her that I’m actually fifteen, in junior high, that I stole my father’s money and ran away from my home in Nakano Ward in Tokyo. That I’m staying in a hotel in Takamatsu and spending my days reading at a library. That all of a sudden I found myself collapsed outside a shrine, covered in blood. Everything. Well,  almost everything. Not the important stuff I can’t talk about.

How to Write Dialogue: The Elements of Good Dialogue Writing

Every story needs dialogue. Unless you’re writing highly experimental fiction , your story will have main characters, and those characters will interact with the world and its other people.

That said, there’s no “correct” way to write dialogue. It all depends on who your characters are, the decisions they make, and how they interact with one another.

Nonetheless, good dialogue writing should do the following:

Develop Your Characters

A close study in how to write dialogue requires a close study in characterization. Your characters reveal who they are through dialogue: by paying close attention to your characters’ word choice , you can clue your reader into their personality traits and hidden psyches.

Your characters will often reveal key aspects of their personality through dialogue.

One character who can’t stop characterizing himself is Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye . J. D. Salinger’s anti-hero could be psychoanalyzed for hours. Take, for example, this excerpt from Holden’s inner dialogue:

“Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”

What do we learn about Holden through this line? For starters, we learn that Holden is the type of person who analyzes and scrutinizes each word – just like writers do, perhaps. We also learn that Holden hates anything positive. Always a downer, Holden despises words of praise or grandeur, thinking the whole world is irresolvably flat, boring, and monotonous. He hates grandness almost as much as he hates phoniness, and both concepts are sure to make him sick.

Holden is a character who puts his entire personality on the page, and as readers, we can’t help but understand him – no matter how much we like him or hate him.

Set the Scene

Dialogue is a great way to explore the setting of your story. When the setting is explored through dialogue writing, both the characters and the reader experience the world of the story at the same time, making the writing feel more intimate and immediate.

When the setting is explored through dialogue writing, the writing feels more intimate and immediate.

You might have your character wander through the streets of New York, as Theo does in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Here’s an excerpt of inner dialogue:

“It was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live.”

Notice Theo’s attention to detail, and the vibrant imagery he uses to capture the city’s energy. Of course, you might set the scene more simply, as Dorothy does when she says:

“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

In only a few words, this line of dialogue advances not only the setting but also Dorothy’s characterization. She is innocent and operating from a limited frame of reference, and the setting could not be more different from her homely Kansas background.

Both methods of scene setting help advance the world that the reader is exploring. However, don’t explore the setting exclusively through dialogue. Characters are not objective observers of their world, so some information is better explained through narration since the narrator is (often) a more reliable voice.

Advance the Plot

Dialogue doesn’t just tell us about the story and the people inside it; good dialogue writing also advances the plot . We often need dialogue to reveal important details to the protagonist , and sometimes, an emotionally tense conversation will lead to the next event in the story.

At times, dialogue will advance the plot by offering a twist or revealing sudden information. We can all agree that the following lines of dialogue advanced the plot of Star Wars :

“Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.”

“He told me enough! He told me you killed him!”

“No. I am your father.”

And the following bit of dialogue catalyzed the plot of the entire Harry Potter series:

“You’re a wizard, Harry.”

The exchange of information is often what accelerates (0r resolves) a story’s conflict. Paying attention to word choice and the strategic revelation of information is key to using dialogue in a story.

Just like in real life, your characters don’t always say what they mean. Characters can lie, hint, suggest, confuse, conceal, and deceive. But one of the most powerful uses of dialogue writing is to foreshadow future events.

In Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet , Romeo foreshadows the death of both lovers when he exclaims to Juliet:

“Life were better ended by their hate, / Than death prorogued, wanting of thy love.”

In saying he would rather die lovers than live in longing, Romeo unknowingly predicts what will soon happen in the play.

Foreshadowing is an important literary device that many fiction stories should utilize. Foreshadowing helps build suspense in the story, and it also underlines the important events that make your story worth reading. Don’t try to trick your readers, but definitely use foreshadowing to keep them reading.

Learn more about foreshadowing here:

Foreshadowing Definition: How to Use Foreshadowing in Your Fiction

We’ve talked about what dialogue writing should accomplish, but that doesn’t answer the question of how to write dialogue in a story. Let’s answer that question now—with some more dialogue writing examples in the mix.

1. How to Write Dialogue in a Story: Differentiate Each Character

Each character will have their own style of speaking, and will emphasize different things when they talk.

Your characters’ dialogue should be like thumbprints, because no two people are alike. Each character will have their own style of speaking, and will emphasize different things when they talk. You can make each character unique by altering the following elements of dialogue style:

• Sentence length: Some people are verbose and loquacious, others terse and stoic.
• Dialogue Punctuation: Do your characters let their sentences linger… or do they ask a lot of questions? Are they really excited all the time?! Or do they interrupt themselves frequently—always remembering something they forgot to mention—struggling to put their complex thoughts into words?
• Adjectives/adverbs: Characters that are expressive and verbose tend to use a lot of adjectives and adverbs, whereas characters that are quiet or less expressive might stick to their nouns and verbs.
• Spellings and pronunciation: Do your characters omit certain vowels? Do they lisp? The way you write a line of dialogue might reveal a character’s dialect, and adding consistent quirks to a character’s speech will certainly make them more memorable.
• Repetitions and emphasis:  Do your characters have any catchphrases? Do they use any words or phrases as crutches? Maybe they emphasize words periodically, or have a strange cadence as they speak. We tend to repeat certain words and phrases in our own everyday vocabularies; repetition is also a useful device for writing dialogue in a story.

You’ve already seen character differentiation from the previous quotes in this article. In this scene from The Catcher in the Rye , notice how differently Holden Caulfield speaks from the young woman he’s talking to—and just how much characterization is implied in their divergent voices:

“You don’t come from New York, do you?” I said finally. That’s all I could think of.

“Hollywood,” she said. Then she got up and went over to where she’d put her dress down, on the bed. “Ya got a hanger? I don’t want to get my dress all wrinkly. It’s brand-clean.”

“Sure,” I said right away. I was only too glad to get up and do something.

Aside from these two characters being different from one another, Holden speak differently than characters in other works of fiction. Can you imagine Holden Caulfield being Romeo in R&J ? He’d say something stupid, like “Juliet’s family are all phonies, but the funny thing is you can’t help but fall half in love with her.”

A more contemporary example comes from  White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Every character in this novel is exceptionally well differentiated, even the minor characters—like Brother Ibrahim ad-Din Shukrallah, who appears only briefly towards the novel’s end. Here’s an excerpt:

“Look around you. And what do you see? What is the result of this so-called democracy, this so-called freedom, this so-called liberty ? Oppression, persecution, slaughter . Brothers, you can see it on national television every day, every evening, every night ! Chaos, disorder, confusion . They are not ashamed or embarrassed or self-conscious ! They don’t try to hide, to conceal, to disguise . They know as we know: the entire world is in a turmoil!”

Pay attention to the dialogue. What do you notice? What’s odd about the way he speaks? If you don’t notice it, the novel’s narrator gives us a hint:

“No one in the hall was going to admit it, but Brother Ibrahim ad-Din Shukrallah was no great speaker, when you got down to it. Even if you overlooked his habit of using three words where one would do, of emphasizing the last word of such triplets with his see-saw Caribbean inflections, even if you ignored these as everybody tried to, he was still physically disappointing.”

For more advice on characterization, check out our article on character development.

https://writers.com/character-development-definition

2. How to Write Dialogue in a Story: Consider the Context

A common mistake writers often make when writing dialogue in a story: they use the same speaking style for that character throughout the entire story.

For example, if you have a character that tends to speak in wordy, roundabout sentences, you might think that every sentence of dialogue should be wordy and roundabout.

However, your character’s dialogue needs to take context into consideration. A wordy character probably won’t be so wordy if they’re being held at gunpoint, and their words might stammer or falter when talking to a crush. Or, in the case of Jane Eyre , the context might make your statement more powerful. Jane proclaims:

“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart!”

As she lives in a society with strict gender roles, Jane’s statement—to a man, no less—is thrillingly bold and controversial for its time.

Your characters aren’t monotonous, they’re dynamic and fluid, so let them speak according to their surroundings.

3. How to Write Dialogue in a Story: Space Out Moments of Dialogue

If your characters just had a lengthy conversation, give them a page or two before they start speaking again. Dialogue is an important part of storytelling, but equally important is narration and description.

The following excerpt from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy has a great balance of dialogue (underlined) and narration.

“Are there any papers from the office?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, taking the telegram and seating himself at the looking-glass.

“On the table,” replied Matvey, glancing with inquiring sympathy at his master; and, after a short pause, he added with a sly smile, “ They’ve sent from the carriage-jobbers.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch made no reply, he merely glanced at Matvey in the looking-glass. In the glance, in which their eyes met in the looking-glass, it was clear that they understood one another. Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes asked: “Why do you tell me that? don’t you know?”

Matvey put his hands in his jacket pockets, thrust out one leg, and gazed silently, good-humoredly, with a faint smile, at his master.

“I told them to come on Sunday, and till then not to trouble you or themselves for nothing,” he said. He had obviously prepared the sentence beforehand.

You can see, in the above text, that about 1/3 of the writing is dialogue. This allows the reader to see the full scene while still viewing the conversation, making this an excellent balance of narration and dialogue writing.

Simply put: balance dialogue with your narrator’s voice, or else the reader might lose their attention, or else miss out on key information.

4. How to Write Dialogue in a Story: Use Consistent Formatting

There are several different ways to format your dialogue, which we explain later in this article. For now, make sure you’re consistent with how you format your dialogue. If you choose to indent your characters’ speech, make sure every new exchange is indented. Inconsistent formatting will throw the reader out of the story, and it could also prevent your story from being published.

How to Write Dialogue in a Story: 4 DON’Ts of Dialogue Writing

Just as important as the DOs, the DON’Ts of dialogue writing are just as important to crafting an effective story. Let’s further our discussion of how to write dialogue in a story: we’ll dive into what you shouldn’t do when writing dialogue, alongside some more dialogue examples.

1. DON’T Include Every Verbal Interjection

When people talk, they don’t always talk linearly. People interrupt themselves, they change direction, they forget what they were talking about, they use pauses and “ums” and “ohs” and “ehs.” You can include a few of these verbal interjections from time to time, but don’t make your dialogue too true-to-life. Otherwise, the dialogue becomes hard to read, and the reader loses interest.

Let’s take a famous line from The Catcher in the Rye and fill it in with verbal interjections.

“I have a feeling that you are riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don’t honestly know what kind.”

With interjections:

Oh, man—I have a feeling, like, that you are riding for some kind of… a terrible, terrible fall. But, uh, I don’t honestly know what kind?

What do you think of the edited quote? The interjections make it much harder to read, much less personable, and honestly, they become kind of annoying. However, the quote with interjections is much more “true to life” than the original quote. Your characters don’t need to speak perfectly, but the dialogue needs to be enjoyable to read.

2. DON’T Overwrite Dialogue Tags

Dialogue tags are how your character expresses what they say. In the quote “‘You’re all phonies,’ Holden said,” the dialogue tag is “Holden said.”

Unique dialogue tags are fine to use on occasion. Your characters might yell, stammer, whisper, or even explode with words! However, don’t use these tags too frequently—the tag “said” is often perfectly fine. Notice how overused dialogue tags ruin the following conversation:

“How are you?” I stammered.

“Great! How are you?” she inquired.

“I’m hungry,” I announced.

“We should get lunch,” she blurted.

“I’m on a diet,” I cried.

“You poor thing,” she rejoined.

Sure, the conversation isn’t interesting to begin with, but the dialogue tags make this writing cringe-worthy. All of this dialogue can be described with “said” or “replied,” and many of these quotes don’t even need dialogue tags, because it’s clear who’s speaking each time.

This is doubly serious when dialogue tags are combined with adverbs : adjectives that modify the verbs themselves. Our intent with these adverbs is to intensify our writing, but what results is a strong case of diminishing returns. Let’s see an example:

“I don’t love you anymore,” she said.

“I don’t love you anymore,” she spat contemptuously.

Yikes! If your dialogue tags start distracting the reader, then your dialogue isn’t doing enough work on its own. The reader’s focus should be on the character’s statement, not on the way they delivered that statement. If she spoke those words with contempt, show the reader this in the dialogue itself, or even in the character’s body language.

Lastly: if you’re going to use a dialogue tag other than “said,” make sure the verb you use actually corresponds to dialogue. In other words, there needs to be a speaking verb before you describe some other sort of action.

Here’s an example of what NOT to do:

“I don’t love you anymore,” she stomped.

She might have stomped while saying that line, but “to stomp” is not a kind of communication.

The dialogue tag “said” is perfectly fine for most situations.

3. DON’T Stereotype

Everybody’s speech has a myriad of influences. Your characters’ way of speaking will be influenced by their parents, upbringing, schooling, socioeconomic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, and their own unique personality traits.

Of course, these personal backgrounds will influence your character’s dialogue. However, you shouldn’t let those traits overpower the character’s dialogue—otherwise, you’ll end up stereotyping.

Stereotyped characters are both glaringly obvious and embarrassing for the author. For example, J. K. Rowling didn’t do herself any favors by naming a character Cho Chang—both of which are Korean last names. Similarly, if all of your male characters are strong, charismatic, and loud, while all of your female characters are meek, helpless, and insecure, your writing will be both offensive and inaccurate to life.

Let’s explore this with two ways of writing a policeman.

“Don’t stand here,” said the policeman in front of the caution tape. “We need to keep this street clear.”

And here is lazy writing that takes no real interest in the character beyond one-dimensional surface traits:

“Move it along, folks, move it along,” said the policeman in front of the caution tape. “Nothing to see here.”

Neither policeman is going to win a dialogue award, but the second policeman doesn’t even seem like a real person . He’s written in unconsidered cliché: phrases we’ve all heard a thousand times, general ideas of what policemen tend to say.

Simply put, stereotyped dialogue is bad writing. Not only does it make your characters one-dimensional, it’s also offensive to whomever your characters resemble. If you’re going to be writing your characters from a careless, surface-level take, you might reconsider whether you want to write them at all.

What to do about this? The safest way to avoid stereotyping is to write using identities that you know both personally and intimately. If your writing takes you beyond those identities, then do your research: seek out, and truly work to internalize, a diverse array of input from people whose identities resemble those you’d like to write about.

4. DON’T Get Discouraged

For some writers, dialogue is the hardest part about writing fiction. It’s much easier to describe a character than to get in the character’s head, transcribing their thoughts into language.

If you feel like your characters aren’t saying the right things, or if the dialogue feels tricky to master, don’t get discouraged. Dialogue writing is difficult!

The following devices and exercises will help you master the art of writing dialogue in a story.

An important consideration for your characters is giving them distinct speech patterns. In real life, everyone talks differently; in fiction it’s much the same. The following devices will help you write dialogue in a story, as they offer ways to make your characters unique, compelling, and conversational.

Note: don’t try to use all nine of these devices for one character. Your dialogue should flow and feel consistent with the way people speak in real life, but if you overload your character’s speech with idioms, colloquialisms, proverbs, slang, and jargon, they won’t speak like anyone in the real world.

Use these devices as quirks for your characters. You can even use colloquialisms and vernacular to establish the setting, or use jargon to assign your character their occupation and social standing. Be wise, be strategic, and keep an ear for how people sound in real life.

Now, here’s how to write dialogue using 9 specific devices.

1. Colloquialism

A colloquialism is a word or phrase that’s specific to a language, geographical region, and/or historical period. Mostly used in informal speech, colloquialisms will rarely show up in the boardroom or the courtroom, but they pop up all the time in casual conversation.

We often use colloquialisms without realizing it. Take, for example, the shopping cart. Someone in the U.S. Northeast might call it a “cart,” while someone in the South might call it a “buggy.”

In fact, colloquialisms abound in the history of the English language. When it rains but the sun is out, a native Floridian might call it a sunshower. A Wisconsinite will call a water fountain a “bubbler.” In the 1950s, a small child might have been called an “ankle-biter.” Nowadays, a New Yorker might describe cold weather as being “brick outside.” (Yes, brick.)

Colloquialisms help define a character’s geographic background and historical time period. They also help signify when the character feels comfortable and informal, versus when they are speaking in an uncomfortable or professional situation.

2. Vernacular

Vernacular refers to language that is simple and commonplace. When a character’s speech is unadorned and everyday, they are speaking in vernacular, using words that can be understood by every person in that character’s time period. (A colloquialism is often an example of vernacular.) For dialogue in a story, your characters will likely use vernacular, unless they try to avoid it at all costs.

The opposite of vernacular would be dialect, which is speech that is tailored to a specific setting, and is therefore not commonplace or universally understood. An example of vernacular is contrasted with dialect below.

A dialect is a type of speech reserved for a particular time period, geographical location, social class, group of people, or other specific setting. It is language that the entire population might not comprehend, as it uses words, phrases, and grammatical decisions that aren’t universally understood.

Here’s an example of modern day vernacular. The same sentence has been rewritten as though it were spoken by someone with a Southern dialect.

Vernacular: I am craving some coleslaw and a soft drink.

Southern Dialect: I’m fixin’ for some slaw and soda pop.

An English speaker who doesn’t hail from the American South may be tripped up by “fixing” and “slaw,” as those terms aren’t universally understood.

Do note: the words “coleslaw” and “soft drink” can also be considered dialects of other regions in the United States. However, these words will likely be understood across the nation.

A slang is a word or phrase that is not part of conventional language usage, but which is still used in everyday speech. Generally, younger generations coin slang words, as well as queer communities and communities of color. (Some of the terms below started in AAVE , or African American Vernacular English.) Those words then become dictionary entries when the word has circulated long enough in popular usage. Slang is a form of colloquialism, as well as a form of dialect, because slang terms are not universally understood and are often associated with a specific age group in a specific region.

Some recent examples of slang words and phrases include:

• No cap—“no lie.”
• Boots—this is a sort of grammatical intensifier, placed  after the thing being intensified. “I’m hungry, boots” is basically the same as “I’m  so hungry.”
• Bop—a catchy or irresistible song.
• Drip—a particularly fashionable or interesting style of clothes.
• It’s sending me—“that’s hilarious.”
• Periodt—a more “final” use of the word “period” when a salient point has been made.
• Snatched—used when someone’s fashion is impeccable. In the case of someone’s waist size, snatched refers to an hourglass figure.
• Pressed—“stressed” or “annoyed.”
• Slaps—“exceptionally good.”
• Stan—stan is a portmanteau of “stalker fan,” but really what it means is that you enjoy something intensely or obsessively. You “stan” a song or a movie, for example.
• Werk—a term to describe something done exceedingly well. If you’re dancing tremendously, I might just yell “werk!”
• Wig—when something shocks, excites, or moves you, just say “wig.”

Jargon is a word or phrase that is specific to a profession or industry. Usually, a jargon word intentionally obfuscates the meaning of what it represents, as the word is meant to be understood solely by people within a certain profession.

Often, people let jargon slip from their tongues without realizing the word is inaccessible. For example, a doctor might tell their friend they have rhinitis, rather than a seasonal allergy. Or, someone well-versed in mid-century diner lingo might ask for “Adam and Eve on a raft” rather than “two poached eggs on toast.”

When it comes to dialogue in a story, the occasional use of jargon can help characterize someone through their profession. However, too much jargon usage will start to sound comical and inane, as most people don’t speak in jargon all the time.

An idiom is a phrase that is specifically understood by speakers of a certain language, and which has a figurative meaning that differs from its literal one. Idioms are incredibly hard to translate, because the meaning conveyed by the idiom does not appear within the words themselves.

For example, a common idiom in the United States is to say someone is “under the weather” when they’re feeling ill. No part of the phrase “under the weather” conveys a sense of sickness; at most, it might communicate that that person feels pushed down by the weather. But then, what weather? Could they be under “good” weather, too? These are questions that someone who doesn’t speak English natively will likely ask.

So, the literal meaning of “under the weather” is different from the figurative meaning, which is “ill.” Some other idioms in the English language include:

• Pulling your leg—just having fun with someone or messing with them.
• Bat a thousand—to be successful 100% of the time.
• The last straw—the final incident before something (usually negative) occurs.
• Big fish in a little sea—someone is famous or hugely successful, but in a very small corner of the world.
• Eat your heart out—be envious of something.

An idiom can also reveal regionality, as some idioms are only spoken in certain dialects. For example, when it rains while the sun is shining, a common idiom in the South is that “the devil is beating his wife.” This phrase is understood in other parts of the U.S. and might have its roots in folklore, but it is primarily spoken by people in the American South.

7. Euphemism

A euphemism is the substitution of one word for another, more innocuous word. We often use euphemisms in place of words and phrases that are sexual, uncomfortable, or otherwise taboo.

For example, when someone dies, you might hear their family member say “they kicked the bucket.” Or, if someone were unemployed but didn’t want to say it, they might say they are “between jobs” or “searching for better opportunities.”

Euphemisms present something psychologically interesting to a person’s dialogue. We often use language to mask that which upsets us most but which we are unwilling to confront or communicate. A euphemism for death is intended to mask the pain of death; a euphemism about unemployment is intended to mask the shame of unemployment.

We might also use euphemisms to hide information from people we don’t trust. Let’s say you’re in an intimate relationship, and don’t want the person you’re conversing with to know about it. You might pull out your knowledge of Middle English and say you’re “giving a girl a green gown.” Or, you might simply say you’re rolling in the hay with someone, to communicate your relationship while also communicating you don’t want to talk about it.

Note: even “intimate relationship” is a bit of a euphemism!

In dialogue writing, use euphemisms as hints to your characters’ psyches. In speech, what is omitted often says more than what is included.

A proverb is a short, oft-repeated saying that bears a wise and powerful message. Proverbs are often based on common sense advice, but they use metaphors and symbols to convey that advice, prompting the listener to place themselves in the world of the proverb.

For example, a common English proverb is “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” This means that it’s better to take away modest gains than to sacrifice those gains for something that may be unobtainable. Sacrificing the bird in your hand for two birds which may be impossible to own is a risky endeavor.

When it comes to writing dialogue in a story, proverbs educate both the protagonist and the audience. A proverb will often be spoken by an elder or someone with relevant experience to help guide the protagonist. The story’s events might also be a reaction to that proverb, either fulfilling or complicating it. Finally, a proverb might characterize the speaker themselves, cluing the reader into the speaker’s beliefs. Not all stories have proverbs, but stories with wise characters often do.

9. Neologism

A neologism is a coined word that describes something new. Some neologisms are coined by authors themselves—Shakespeare, for example, coined over 2,000 words, many of which we use today. “Baseless,” “footfall,” and “murkiest” come from The Tempest , just one of Shakespeare’s many plays and poems.

Nowadays, most neologisms describe advancements in technology, medicine, and society. “Doomscrolling,” for example, describes the act of consuming large quantities of negative news, often to the detriment of one’s mental health. The word was likely invented in 2018, due in part to the increased access to information that technology gives us.

Other modern day neologisms include:

• Google (as a verb: to google something)
• Crowdsourcing

Some neologisms are portmanteaus, which is a word made from two other words combined in both sound and meaning. For example, “smog” is a portmanteau of “smoke and fog,” and it’s a neologism only relevant to the Industrial Revolution and beyond.

Neologisms are not to be confused with grandiloquent words , which are invented words used for the sole purpose of sounding intelligent (and which have become enduring facets of modern English).

In dialogue writing, neologisms primarily help situate the reader in the story’s temporal setting. No one would use the word malware in the year 1920. Additionally, words like “crowdsourcing” are far more likely to be used by younger generations, and they signify a certain sense of tech savviness and modernity that not everyone has.

Finally, neologisms are fun! You might even invent some new words in your own writing, though a neologism should be elegant and relevant, without drawing too much attention to itself.

Of course, the best way to learn how to write dialogue in a story is to practice it yourself. Below are some dialogue writing exercises to try in your fiction.

Dialogue Writing Exercise: Write out a character’s “personal vocabulary.”

All of us have a personal vocabulary, meaning that we tend to choose the same set of words to describe something, even though our vocabularies are much larger. For example, I have a tendency to use the word “scandalous” when describing something. I often use it ironically or as a compliment, which is a trait of word-usage associated with Millennials and older Gen Z kids. This word is a part of my personal vocabulary, and though I don’t say it constantly, I often use it when I can’t think of a better word.

Your characters are the same way! Writing out a personal vocabulary for your characters might jumpstart your dialogue writing, and it also gives you something to fall back on in your dialogue while still providing depth and character.

Coming back—once again—to Holden Caulfield, his personal vocabulary might include words like: phony , prostitute , goddam , miserable , lousy , jerk . These words and phrases are rare overall, but they’re exceedingly common in his own personal way of verbalizing his experience of the world.

Dialogue Writing Exercise: Consider different settings.

Sometimes, you just need to generate dialogue until you come across the right line or turn-of-phrase. One way to do that is to write what your character would say in different situations.

On a separate document or piece of paper, write what would happen if your character was talking to different people or talking in different situations. For example, your character might:

• Talk to a grocery store clerk
• Be a hostage in a bank robbery
• Take the SAT
• Run into their crush
• Get pulled over for speeding

Explore what your character would say in each of these (and other) different scenarios, and you might just trick your brain into writing the next sentence of your story.

Dialogue Writing Exercise: Pretend you are your character.

Instead of writing your character in different settings, be your character in different settings. Think about what your character would think while you’re doing the laundry, driving to work, or paying the bills. This habit will help you approach this character’s dialogue, as you develop the ability to turn their personality on in your brain, like a switch!

(Hopefully, you’re never caught in a bank robbery. If you are, maybe your character can save you.)

We’ve covered how to write dialogue in a story, but not how to format dialogue. Dialogue formatting is a relatively minor concern for fiction writers, but it’s still important to format correctly. Otherwise, you’ll waste hours of your writing time trying to fix formatting errors, and you might prevent your stories from finding publication.

There are a few different ways to format dialogue; for each of these examples, we will reformat the sentence “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” said Chief Brody.

Most writers and publishers use standard quotation marks at the beginning and end of the dialogue.

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” said Chief Brody.

A comma always separates the dialogue from the speaker. In this case, the comma goes inside of the quotation marks. Periods, semicolons, and em dashes also go inside the quotation marks. If you’re writing in British English, some conventions place the dialogue punctuation outside of the quotation, but both ways are acceptable.

Another way some people format their dialogue is by italicizing instead of using quotation marks.

You’re gonna need a bigger boat, said Chief Brody.

In this instance, you would fit the comma within the italicized text, as you would any other punctuation in the dialogue. Only the quote is italicized; the speaker remains unitalicized. The drawback of this formatting is that your dialogue might be confused with the character’s inner dialogue, which should also be italicized.

Finally, your dialogue formatting can eschew the use of quotation marks and italics. In this case, you would indent any part of the text that is dialogue, and leave narration un-indented.

Suddenly, the shark loomed behind the orca.

This way of formatting makes it easier to write without worrying about punctuation marks, but be warned that most publishers will change that formatting before publication.

If your sentence starts with the dialogue tag, put a comma before the quotation mark. Do capitalize the first letter inside the quotation marks, as this is, grammatically, the start of a sentence.

Chief Brody said, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

And, if your dialogue spans multiple paragraphs, do not use the end-quote until the very end of the dialogue, but start each paragraph with a new start-quote.

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat. “A boat this size can’t handle a shark,” Chief Brody continued.

Looking for More Dialogue Writing Tips?

Great dialogue is the true test of whether you understand your characters or not. However, developing this skill takes a lot of time and practice. If you’re looking for more advice on how to write dialogue in a story, check out our online fiction writing courses for dialogue writing tips from the best instructors on the net!

Sean Glatch

10 comments.

This was very helpful: I’m a French Canadian, living here in the US for the past 28 years, very fluent in English and this article will help me to polish my stories telling. I love to write spending a lot of time doing so, whether it’s a story, an email, documentation in my field (I’m an IT guy) and I’m now more confident about my writing.

I’m so happy to hear that, Richard. Happy writing!

As an aspiring writer, this helped me a lot!

Great article! Nice job capturing so many elements and explaining things so well. I enjoyed it from beginning to end.

The only thing that puzzled me was in the following section (watch for the **):

If your sentence starts with the dialogue tag, put a comma before the quotation mark. **In this case, do not capitalize the first letter inside the quotation marks.**

Chief Brody said, “you’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

I’ve never seen that guidance before. I thought you were supposed to capitalize the first word of complete dialogue sentences regardless of speaker attribution placement. Might this be a mistake? Or a vestige from a previous edit?

You’re absolutely right–that bit of advice was written in error. The start of a new sentence of dialogue should always begin with a capital letter. I’ve updated the text accordingly. Many thanks for your comment!

[…] How to Write Dialogue in a Story […]

Thank you, Nicole! I’m so glad you found it helpful. Happy writing!

Directed here from somewhere else. A novice when it comes to fiction writing and the proper use of English. I fid dialogue my most difficult in writing. I am glad for this. I get most of the gist now.

I came across your website while doing some research for my writing students and I have to say this is one of the best resources I’ve found when it comes to writing dialogue. Thank you for taking the time to put together such a valuable resource and one which I’ll be passing on to my students.

Thank you again!

Really great advice. One thing I often do is get my students to ‘capture conversations’ so they can hear the cadence of real dialogue. Then we look at how to make it more powerful by taking out most if not all of the ‘um’s, ah’s’ and other interruptions or interjections. It has improved the quality of my students written dialogue immensely. 🙂

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A Complete Guide To Writing Dialogue

One of the writer’s most effective tools is dialogue. A story with little or no conversation between characters can sometimes make the eyelids flicker. Too much may leave the reader breathless. Writing dialogue is tough and a skill that takes time to master. 

However, there are plenty of useful tips, tools and methods to help you learn how to write dialogue in a story and how to format it too.

And for your benefit, you can find them all in this comprehensive guide.

Below, you can find the definition of dialogue, tags and formatting guidelines and a discussion on the different ways characters speak and converse.

And you can also find plenty of illuminating dialogue examples to help you gain a clear understanding of the mechanics and how you can apply it to our own writing.

You can jump through this guide by clicking below:

Choose A Chapter

What is dialogue, how to format dialogue.

• Should I Use ‘Said’ And Asked?

How To Write Dialogue Between Two Characters

How to write dialogue readers love, how to write internal dialogue, an exercise on how to write dialogue in a story, good dialogue examples from fiction, technical writing tip – how does dialogue impact the pacing of a story, how do you edit dialogue, more guides on creative writing.

Dialogue is defined as a conversation between two or more characters , particularly in the context of a book, film or play.

Specific to writing, dialogue is the conversation between characters.

A n author may use dialogue to provide the reader with new information about characters or the plot, delivered in a more natural way. They may also utilise it to speed up the pace of the story.

As we’ll see below, there seems to be one pervading guideline when it comes to writing great dialogue and that is clarity reigns supreme.

What Is Internal Dialogue?

Internal dialogue is that which happens within a character’s mind . This can sometimes be reflected in fiction with the use of italics. For example:

I hope they don’t come down here, Mycah thought.

Internal dialogue is a great way of delving deeper into a character’s mind and perspective and is a powerful weapon when it comes to characterization. We explore it in more detail below.

Writers have different stylistic preferences when it comes to dialogue. Below, we’ll take a look at some of the best practices and common literary conventions, such as the use of a dialogue tag and quotation marks. 

Using Quotation Marks

If sticking to the principle of clarity reigns supreme, then for me, using double quotation marks is the most effective way of communicating dialogue.

They’re universally recognised as a means of conveying dialogue, and they stand out more on the page in contrast to single quotation marks. There are more reasons for using them, however, and that involves a criqute of the single quotation mark.

Writing Dialogue With Single Quotation Marks

This does come down to a matter of style.

The best format I’ve found, and by best I mean the approach readers find clearest, is to use speech marks (“) as opposed to a single apostrophe (‘).

If, for instance, a character is speaking and quotes someone else, single quotation marks can be used within the speech marks, therefore avoiding any confusion, for example:

  “I can’t believe she called me ‘an ungrateful cow.’ She’s got some nerve.”

Format Dialogue On A Single Line

Another helpful approach to help maintain clarity is to begin a piece of dialogue on a new line whenever a new character speaks. For instance:

“Who was at the door?” Nick asked. “A couple of Mormons,” Sarah said.

Adding Dialogue Tags

Dialogue tags are simply a piece of prose that follows a piece of speech that identifies who spoke. You can see it in the example above featuring Nick and Sarah.

You can use a dialogue tag in lots of useful ways. For example body language.

If a character reacts to something another character says or does, to maintain clarity, pop the reaction on a new line, followed by dialogue. So for example:

“We’re all sold out,” Dan said. Jim sighed. “Have you not got any in the back?”

Do You Always Need To Use Dialogue Tags?

Something I’ve noticed some of my favourite writers doing—James Barclay and George R.R. Martin, in particular—is, when possible, avoid using an attribution altogether. Less is more, as they say. If just a couple of people are talking, it may already be clear from the voices and language of the characters who exactly is speaking.

Again, to aid clarity, if there are a number of people involved in a conversation, it helps to use an attribution whenever a different character speaks. Nobody wants to waste time re-reading passages to check who’s speaking. I don’t enjoy it and I’m sure others don’t either.

Repetitive use of attribution may grate on a reader. It can suggest a lack of trust in them to follow the story. It helps when editing to look for moments where it’s unclear who’s speaking and if necessary add an attribution.

A brief point on the styles of attribution. If you read a lot, you may notice some writers prefer the order “John said,” and some prefer “said John”. Sanderson is of the view that the character’s name should come first because that’s the most important bit of information to the reader. But the likes of Tolkien adopted the latter version. It’s all personal preference. Why not mix and match?

Should I Use “Said” And “Asked”?

When it comes to the questions I often see asked on how to write dialogue, this is perhaps the most common.

An attribution, also known as an identifier or tag, is the part of the sentence that follows a piece of dialogue. For example: “John said.” In his creative writing lectures, Brandon Sanderson shares a few useful tips.

• Try to place the attribution as early as possible to help make it clear in the reader’s mind who is speaking. This can be done mid-sentence, such as: “I don’t fancy that,” Milo said. “What else do you have?” Breaking away like this works well if a character is going to be speaking for a few lines or paragraphs. You can also use an attribution before the dialogue, though there’s something about this that I find jarring. Used sparingly it works well, but too often just seems annoying and archaic. It’s all personal preference though.
• Try using beats, but not too many. What’s a beat? A beat is a reaction to something said or done. So for example facial expressions like frowning, smiling, narrowing of the eyes, biting of the lip, and hand gestures such as pointing, clenching fists, and fidgeting. And then you’ve got physical movements, like pacing up and down, smashing a glass, punching a wall.
• Don’t worry about using ‘said’ and ‘asked’. To the reader, these words are almost invisible. What they care about is who exactly is speaking.
• When a character first speaks refer to them by name, but after that, it’s fine to refer to them as he or she, provided they’re still the one speaking. It’s even desirable to use the pronoun; repeating a name over and over can irritate a reader.

Remember the overarching principle for when it comes to writing dialogue: clarity reigns supreme. Using ‘said’ and ‘asked’ is often the clearest way of getting your point across.

What To Use Instead Of Said In Dialogue

Remember, there’s no problem with using the word ‘said’ after a piece of dialogue. But if you find when reading your piece aloud that the repeated use jars, especially in a dialogue-rich scene, you may want to mix things up.

Using words other than ‘said’ can help to characterize too—everybody reacts differently to things and those reactions reveal a lot about a person.

So, here’s a list of twenty words that you can use instead of ‘said’ when writing dialogue:

• Pointed out
• Interrupted

So, let’s take a look at how to write dialogue between two characters. If you’d rather have a visual explainer, check out this informative video below.

A useful distinction to make is between everyday dialogue and the dialogue we find in fiction.

The chatter we hear in real life is full of rambling, repetitive sentences, grumbles, grunts, ‘erms’ and ‘ahs’, with answers to questions filled with echoes (repeating a part of the question posed, e.g. “How are you?” asked A. “How am I?” B answered).

When we think of the dialogue we read in books, it contains little of the things we find in these everyday exchanges. According to Sol Stein, there’s a reason for this—it’s boring to read.

If it holds no relevance to the story, we don’t care if a character’s cat prefers to eat at your neighbour’s house instead of your own, or if they think their nail job isn’t worth the money they paid, or if they think the window cleaner isn’t cleaning their windows. There are some snippets we overhear on the street that are interesting—an unusual name, a section of a story we want to know more about. Rare diamonds in a mine miles deep. I’ve fallen into the trap of trying to achieve realistic dialogue and it makes for drawn-out scenes and boring exchanges.

According to Stein, dialogue ought not to be a recording of actual speech, but rather a semblance of it.

What is this semblance of dialogue why should we try and achieve it?

So, how do we write  good  dialogue?

When we scrutinise a person as they’re talking (all the boring stuff aside) we discover a lot about their character: who they are, what they believe in, and sometimes, if they reveal them, their motives. We glean all this from word choice, sentence structure, choice of topic, their behaviour as they say something.

It’s these little details we as writers must dig for, so when it comes to writing our own dialogue, we can use them to help characterise our own characters and, if possible, develop the plot. The key to mastering dialogue , according to Stein, is to factor in both characterisation and plot.

How do we do it? Let’s look at some dialogue writing examples:

Milford:                       How are you? Belle:                            How am I? I’m fine. How are you? Milford:                       Well thanks. And the family? Belle:                            Great

I had to stop myself from stabbing my eyes out with my pen. This example is mundane, riddled with echoes, and gives us no imagery about the characters involved. How about this version?

Milford:                        How are you? Belle:                            Oh, I’m sorry, didn’t see you there. Milford:                        Is this a bad time? Belle:                            No, no. Absolutely not.

See the difference? Milford asks Belle a question, which Belle doesn’t answer. This is an example of oblique dialogue . It’s indirect, evasive, and creates conflict.

It’s a great tool for when it comes to looking at how to write dialogue in a story using different approaches. Our character is not getting answers. Oblique language helps to reveal a bit about the characters and the plot, namely that Belle could be a bit shifty and up to something unsavoury.

Writing Realistic Dialogue

When it comes to knowing how to write natural dialogue, the question to ask yourself is whether or not this style is going to fit your story.

Natural dialogue suits some stories wonderfully. However, it can also work against your story, maybe confusing things for your readers or making it too difficult to read.

When it comes to writing natural dialogue, it’s important to bear in mind the principles discussed here. Give your conversations purpose, make them oblique or intriguing, and don’t give information up cheaply.

You can achieve this in a natural or more casual or informal style.

If you’re looking for more visual tips and advice on writing dialogue, check out this excellent video below:

Say It Aloud

When you’ve written a piece of dialogue, one of the best and simplest techniques to check how it works is to say it out loud.

In doing so you’ll get a sense of how natural it is or whether it jars, or even if it’s cringy or cliche—we’ve all been there.

If you don’t feel comfortable speaking it aloud, you can use a Text to Voice function, like on a website like Natural Readers which allows you to paste in text and then have it read it back to you (it’s free).

Add Slang From Your World

An effective way to write good dialogue that not only characterizes and drives the plot but adds to your world, is to use slang or world-specific references. This can be particularly useful in the fantasy and sci-fi genres .

For example, in my novel  Pariah’s Lament , I refer to the world in place of phrases that refer to our own. So instead of “What in the world was that?” I’d say something like “What in Tervia was that?”

Small Talk And Hellos And Goodbyes

As a general rule, there’s no need to include small talk, hellos and goodbyes. The reader isn’t really too bothered about these niceties. They just want to get to the action, the conflict.

You can brush over things like small talk and hellos with short descriptions in your prose writing . For instance:

Stef and John stepped into the room. A sea of smiling faces welcomed them and before they knew it, they were shaking hands and embracing. “I wasn’t expecting such a warm welcome,” Stef said. “It’s like they have no idea what we’ve done,” John replied. “Maybe they don’t.” “Or maybe they do, and it’s all a ruse.” Stef looked at him a moment, thoughtful. “You’re getting paranoid.”

See here how the hellos were glided by and we’re straight into more interesting dialogue? You can also cut back on the odd superfluous dialogue tag too if it doesn’t add to your story.

Give Your Characters Their Own Voice

A character’s voice is an important factor in dialogue. Nobody speaks in the same way. Some people have lisps, some people say their ‘r’s’ like ‘w’s’, some people don’t enunciate properly, say words differently, speak in accents, and have a nasal twang. There are so many variables.

Introducing these features to some or all of your characters can help to make them more memorable and distinct.

How To Write Dialogue For A Drunk Character

When we’re writing our stories it’s likely that some of our characters may become intoxicated with alcohol or drugs. This creates the question in a writer’s mind, how do you write dialogue for a drunk character?

We can fall into the trap of spelling out the words that they try to say, factoring in the slurs, the missed words and the mispronunciations. The problem this can create is that it can go against our overarching principle of clarity reigns supreme.

Dialogue that’s too difficult to read can cause frustration in the reader. They may get fed up and stop reading altogether—the last thing we want.

The best technique is to provide a description of how the person is talking. Describe how they slur their words, how certain letters sound in their drunken state and so on. Including body language in this will help a great deal too. You can then write dialogue in a more natural and understandable way.

The same applies to the likes of writing stuttering in dialogue. It can be very frustrating for a person to listen to a person with a stutter. To include it in your writing can cause problems too. So again one of the best solutions is to describe the stutter first and then write dialogue naturally.

Hopefully, these tips will help you with how to write dialogue for our intoxicated characters.

An Author May Use Dialogue To Provide The Reader With Information, But Don’t Info Dump

An author may use dialogue to provide the reader with useful information. However, if done incorrectly it can have a negative effect.

In his book The First Five Pages , Noah Lukeman says that one of his biggest reasons for rejecting a manuscript is the use of informative dialogue. In other words, using dialogue as a means for conveying information, or info-dumping . He says it suggests the writer is lazy, too unimaginative to convey the information in a subtler way. If you’d like to learn more about avoiding info dumps, check out my guide on natural worldbuilding .

Sometimes dialogue will give us no information at all. Sometimes snippets. Often if you overhear a conversation between two people you’ll find you understand little of what they discuss. It’s the little details they reveal that are most interesting. Take the example of someone mentioning they went to the hospital. The person they’re with may know why they went, but you don’t. Give the reader pieces of the giant puzzle and leave them wanting more.

Lukeman suggests a few solutions to mend instances of informative dialogue. One is to highlight pieces of dialogue that merely convey information and do not reveal or suggest the character’s personality or wants. Break them apart and find a way to let them trickle into the story.

Understanding how to write internal dialogue can prove a key weapon in your writing arsenal.

This style of dialogue can be employed effectively in scenes or stories focused on lone characters. It can break up the monotony of long paragraphs of exposition, which provides welcome relief to readers. Unlike other forms, you don’t need to use a dialogue tag as such.

There are a couple of common ways that you can employ internal dialogue in writing:

• The first option is to italicise the comments made by your character internally. For example: “A door downstairs slammed shut.  It’s not windy tonight. How the hell could that have happened?” The main idea here is that the italicised words make it clear to the reader that this is internal dialogue.
• Another option is to write internal dialogue as you would normal dialogue, with speech marks. The difference is what follows that passage of conversation. Usually, it’s something like, “I really do need to get that fixed,” Halle thought to herself. Here, you simply identify that the dialogue was spoken in the mind and not aloud.

As for which is best for how to write effective dialogue for internal thoughts, it’s all a matter of style. However, my personal preference is using italics. To me, it’s just clearer to readers, and that’s the main aim. So that is how to write internal dialogue.

As a little exercise, try and think of some oblique responses to the following line. I’ll give you an example to start. Remember to factor in Stein’s key ingredients— characterisation and plot:

            Exercise: “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

            Example: “Did you say the same thing to that blonde girl behind the bar?”

In this example of how to write dialogue, we get a response that avoids answering the statement. She could quite easily turn around and say “Thank you,” but that’s boring. Instead, we’re wondering about this man and what he’s about, and a bit more about the woman too, namely that she’s observant.

Let’s take a look at some good dialogue examples from some of the finest pieces of fiction to grave our bookshelves:

Dialogue Example #1 “The Silence of the Lambs” by Thomas Harris

“Good morning, Dr. Lecter. How are you feeling?”

“Better than your last visit, Clarice. Shall I have a chair brought in for you?”

“No thank you, I’d rather stand.”

“Please, sit. That’s better. You know, you remind me of someone. A young man I met long ago. He was a student like yourself, with a quick mind and a charming smile. I wonder what became of him.”

“I don’t know, Dr. Lecter. I’m here to ask you about Buffalo Bill.”

Dialogue Example #2 “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger

“You’re lucky. You’re really lucky. You know that, don’t you?” I said.

“Don’t worry about me,” Sally said. “I’ll be all right. I’m serious.”

“I know you will,” I said. “That’s why I’d like to talk to you for just a minute. This is no kidding. You’re going to have to have yourself a grand time this summer. Especially this summer. Have yourself a real need. Because you’re going to go to a lot of parties, and some of them are going to be quite grim, and you’re going to need that need.”

“I know I will,” Sally said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I know you will,” I said. “But do it anyway. Do it for me. Okay?”

Dialogue Example #3 “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee

“Atticus, are we going to win it?”

“No, honey.”

“Then why-”

“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,” Atticus said.

One of the most important things to know when it comes to looking at dialogue is the impact it has on pacing.

Dialogue has a knack for increasing the pace and moving the story forward. Readers can find themselves tearing through pages laden with dialogue. As if with all tools of the craft, it pays to know how best to use it. Literary agent Noah Lukeman said a writer must learn how to use restraint when it comes to dialogue, “to sustain suspense and let a scene unfold slowly.”

Again, it’s all a matter of preference.

It’s one thing to know how to write dialogue, it’s another to know how to edit it.

For sound editing advice a good person to turn to is a master editor. In his book on the craft of writing, Sol Stein provides a very helpful checklist when going over passages of conversation:

• What is the purpose of this exchange? Does it begin or heighten an existing conflict, for example?
• Does it stimulate curiosity in the reader?
• Does it create tension?
• What is the outcome of the exchange? Builds to a climax, or a turn of events in the story, or a change in relationship with the speakers?
• Has the correct dialogue tag been used for each character, one that enhances the tale.

One additional step Stein recommends is reading dialogue aloud in a monotone expression. Listen to the meaning of the words in your exchanges.

“What counts is not what is said but the effect of what it means… The reader takes from fiction the meaning of words. And above all, they take the emotion that meaning generates.”

So these are a few things that I’ve found helpful when it comes to writing dialogue. As we’ve seen, an author may use dialogue to provide the reader with interesting information, delivered in a compelling and intriguing way.

Perhaps the most important advice I’ve taken away from them all is to always maintain clarity while using obliqueness to give dialogue that snappy, enticing edge. It’s easier said than done, mind.

Before I leave you, I wanted to point you in the direction of some other guides I think you may find useful.

• Great Examples Of The 5 Senses In Writing
• Men Writing Women
• How To Avoid Duplicate Content Issues – if you need help with plagiarism or making your content unique, head here
• How To Plot A Story
• More Dialogue Writing Examples   from Florida Gulf Coast University, with useful advice on making the best use of a dialogue tag

For more writing tips and guides , head here. Or you can find lots of links on all types of creative writing topics on my home page . Thanks for reading this guide on how to write dialogue that readers will love.

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8 thoughts on “A Complete Guide To Writing Dialogue”

I think crafting one’s own “book on writing” is a great exercise for any writer, regardless of whether or not they want to publish it. The act itself is a great way to organize one’s thoughts and ideas about writing, and compare one’s existing ideas to those one may encounter through others (books, blogs, interviews, etc.). I don’t know if mine will ever be fit for publication, but I find it very helpful to write such things down, instead of worrying about whether or not I’ll remember it.

Definitely! That’s one of the main reasons I’m doing it. We’ve got nothing to lose!

Mmm. And writing it out, organizing it, really helps us retain it afterwards. I feel like I rarely need to consult my notes, but the act of writing them out really helps.

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• How-To Guides

How To Write Dialogue In A Story (With Examples)

One of the biggest mistakes made by writers is how they use dialogue in their stories. Today, we are going to teach you how to write dialogue in a story using some easy and effective techniques. So, get ready to learn some of the best techniques and tips for writing dialogue!

There are two main reasons why good dialogue is so important in works of fiction. First, good dialogue helps keep the reader interested and engaged in the story. Second, it makes your work easier to write, read and understand. So, if you want to write dialogue that is interesting, engaging and easy to read, keep on reading. We will be teaching you the best techniques and tips for writing dialogue in a story.

Internal vs External Dialogue

Direct vs indirect dialogue, 20 tips for formatting dialogue in stories, step 1: use a dialogue outline, step 2: write down a script, step 3: edit & review your script, step 4: sprinkle in some narrative, step 5: format your dialogue, what is dialogue .

Dialogue is the spoken words that are spoken between the characters of a story. It is also known as the conversation between the characters. Dialogue is a vital part of a story. It is the vehicle of the characters’ thoughts and emotions. Good dialogue helps show the reader how the characters think and feel. It also helps the reader better understand what is happening in the story. Good dialogue should be interesting, informative and natural. 

In a story, dialogue can be expressed internally as thoughts, or externally through conversations between characters. A character thinking to themself would be considered internal dialogue. Here there is no one else, just one character thinking or speaking to themselves:

Mary thought to herself, “what if I can do better…”

While two or more characters talking to each other in a scene would be an external dialogue:

“Watch out!” cried Sam. “What’s wrong with you?” laughed Kate.

In most cases, the words spoken by your character will be inside quotation marks. This is called direct dialogue. And then everything outside the quotation marks is called narrative:

“What do you want?” shrieked Penelope as she grabbed her notebooks. “Oh, nothing… Just checking if you needed anything,” sneered Peter as he tried to peek over at her notes.

Indirect dialogue is a summary of your dialogue. It lets the reader know that a conversation happened without repeating it exactly. For example:

She was still fuming from last night’s argument. After being called a liar and a thief, she had no choice but to leave home for good.

Direct dialogue is useful for quick conversations, while indirect dialogue is useful for summarising long pieces of dialogue. Which otherwise can get boring for the reader. Writers can combine both types of dialogue to increase tension and add drama to their stories.

Now you know some of the different types of dialogue in stories, let’s learn how to write dialogue in a story.

Here are the main tips to remember when formatting dialogue in stories or works of fiction:

• Always use quotation marks: All direct dialogue is written inside quotation marks, along with any punctuation relating to that dialogue.

• Don’t forget about dialogue tags: Dialogue tags are used to explain how a character said something.  Each tag has at least one noun or pronoun, and one verb indicating how the dialogue is spoken. For example, he said, she cried, they laughed and so on.

• Dialogue before tags: Dialogue before the dialogue tags should start with an uppercase. The dialogue tag itself begins with a lowercase.

• Dialogue after tags: Both the dialogue and dialogue tags start with an uppercase to signify the start of a conversation. The dialogue tags also have a comma afterwards, before the first set of quotation marks.

• Lowercase for continued dialogue: If the same character continues to speak after the dialogue tags or action, then this dialogue continues with a lowercase.

• Action after complete dialogue: Any action or narrative text after completed dialogue starts with an uppercase as a new sentence.

• Action interrupting dialogue: If the same character pauses their dialogue to do an action, then this action starts with a lowercase.

• Interruptions by other characters: If another character Interrupts a character’s dialogue, then their action starts with an uppercase on a new line. And an em dash (-) is used inside the quotation marks of the dialogue that was interrupted. 

• Use single quotes correctly: Single quotes mean that a character is quoting someone else.

• New paragraphs equal new speaker: When a new character starts speaking, it should be written in a new paragraph. 

• Use question marks correctly: If the dialogue ends with a question mark, then the part after the dialogue should begin with a lowercase.

• Exclamation marks: Similar to question marks, the next sentence should begin with a lowercase. 

• Em dashes equal being cut off: When a character has been interrupted or cut off in the middle of their speech, use an em dash (-).

• Ellipses mean trailing speech: When a character is trailing off in their speech or going on and on about something use ellipses (…). This is also good to use when a character does not know what to say.

• Spilt long dialogue into paragraphs: If a character is giving a long speech, then you can split this dialogue into multiple paragraphs. 

• Use commas appropriately: If it is not the end of the sentence then end the dialogue with a comma.

• Full stops to end dialogue: Dialogue ending with a full stop means it is the end of the entire sentence. 

• Avoid fancy dialogue tags: For example, ‘he moderated’ or ‘she articulated’. As this can distract the reader from what your characters are actually saying and the content of your story. It’s better to keep things simple, such as using he said or she said.
• No need for names: Avoid repeating your character’s name too many times. You could use pronouns or even nicknames. 
• Keep it informal: Think about how real conversations happen. Do people use technical or fancy language when speaking? Think about your character’s tone of voice and personality, what would they say in a given situation? 

Remember these rules, and you’ll be able to master dialogue writing in no time!

How to Write Dialogue in 5 Steps

Dialogue is tricky. Follow these easy steps to write effective dialogue in your stories or works of fiction:

A dialogue outline is a draft of what your characters will say before you actually write the dialogue down. This draft can be in the form of notes or any scribblings about your planned dialogue. Using your overall book outline , you can pinpoint the areas where you expect to see the most dialogue used in your story. You can then plan out the conversation between characters in these areas. 

A good thing about using a dialogue outline is that you can avoid your characters saying the same thing over and over again. You can also skim out any unnecessary dialogue scenes if you think they are unnecessary or pointless. 

Here is an example of a dialogue outline for a story:

You even use a spreadsheet to outline your story’s dialogue scenes.

In this step, you will just write down what the characters are saying in full. Don’t worry too much about punctuation and the correct formatting of dialogue. The purpose of this step is to determine what the characters will actually say in the scene and whether this provides any interesting information to your readers.

Start by writing down the full script of your character’s conversations for each major dialogue scene in your story. Here is an example of a dialogue script for a story:

Review your script from the previous step, and think about how it can be shortened or made more interesting. You might think about changing a few words that the characters use to make it sound more natural. Normally the use of slang words and informal language is a great way to make dialogue between characters sound more natural. You might also think about replacing any names with nicknames that characters in a close relationship would use. 

The script might also be too long with plenty of unnecessary details that can be removed or summarised as part of the narration in your story (or as indirect dialogue). Remember the purpose of dialogue is to give your story emotion and make your characters more realistic. At this point you might also want to refer back to your character profiles , to see if the script of each character matches their personality. 

Once your script has been perfected, you can add some actions to make your dialogue feel more believable to readers. Action or narrative is the stuff that your characters are actually doing throughout or in between dialogue. For example, a character might be packing up their suitcase, as they are talking about their holiday plans. This ‘narrative’ is a great way to break up a long piece of dialogue which otherwise could become boring and tedious for readers. 

You have now planned your dialogue for your story. The final step is to incorporate these dialogue scenes into your story. Remember to follow our formatting dialogue formatting rules explained above to create effective dialogue for your stories!

That’s all for today! We hope this post has taught you how to write dialogue in a story effectively. If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments below!

Marty the wizard is the master of Imagine Forest. When he's not reading a ton of books or writing some of his own tales, he loves to be surrounded by the magical creatures that live in Imagine Forest. While living in his tree house he has devoted his time to helping children around the world with their writing skills and creativity.

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How to Write Dialogue: Step-by-Step and Infographic

By Jarie Bolander

Download the Math of Storytelling Infographic

Learning how to write dialogue is an essential part of telling stories that work. Dialogue is a character’s verbal and non-verbal expression of what they are thinking and feeling. It’s through dialogue that other characters get a glimpse into what’s going on in each other’s minds. It’s also used to reveal to the reader those inner thoughts, feelings, and actions that want to come out. 

Contrast that with narration, which describes the world in which the characters find themselves in as well as the inner thoughts of potentially some of the characters. It’s through the balance of Dialogue and Narration that the story reveals itself to the readers and characters.

Dialogue is the Yin to narration’s Yang. They both must be present and strengthen each other. Without clear, concise, and compelling dialogue, your character’s authentic self won’t shine through, the tension in your scenes won’t progressively complicate , and all that great narration will be for nothing.

Dialogue must always serve a purpose. It intensifies the action as well as organizes it so that the emotion that people feel in a situation builds up while the characters are processing what’s going on. This real-time processing is important to remember since it’s these beats of processing that build great dialogue.

Types of Dialogue

There are two types of dialogue to think about when you’re writing a story — inner and outer dialogues. Both are important to understand and use depending on the type of characters and the story you’re trying to tell.

Outer Dialogue

Outer dialogue is a conversation between two or more characters. This is the type that is the easiest to identify since the tags and markers are present and it feels like a conversation.

Inner Dialogue

This type of dialogue is when the character speaks to themselves and reveals parts of their personalities or unburdens their soul. Inner dialogue is usually written as a stream of consciousness or dramatic monologue or just thoughts. Sometimes italicized, sometimes not. Sometimes with attributions, sometimes not. The way that inner dialogue is rendered on the page will depend on the POV/Narrative Device choice.

A stream of consciousness type dialogue describes the flow of thoughts in the mind(s) of the character(s). It borders on narration in that there are no dialogue markers or tags per se. It’s usually obvious when it’s happening. 

Dialogue Lives at the Beat Level

A story has a nested structure with the smallest level being a beat . The story then builds up to scenes, sequences, acts, subplots, and finally the global story. For dialogue, it’s important to start at the beat level because the action and reaction that the character(s) are doing, based on the dialogue, will change as the scene moves from beat to beat. In the Story Grid universe, we use the Five Commandments of Story to build up these different story parts since they all nest together as you go from micro to macro.

A Quick Review of the Five Commandments of Story

The five commandments of story make up the component parts of a story. These commandments must be present at all levels for each component to work and move the story forward. Briefly, these five commandments are:

• Inciting Incident : upsets the life balance of your lead protagonist(s). It must make them uncomfortably out of sync for good or for bad.
• Progressive Complication(s): move the story forward (never backward) by making life more and more complicated for the protagonist(s). The stakes must progressively get higher and higher until the turning point progressive complication that shifts the life value and prompts the crisis.
• Crisis: the point where the protagonist(s) must make a decision by answering the best bad choice or irreconcilable goods question such as: do I go in the cave or not? Or do I share my true feelings or not?
• Climax: is the answer (the decision plus the action) to the question raised by a crisis.
• Resolution: the results (good or bad) from the answer in the climax

For dialogue, we’ll look at a similar set of commandments or tasks inspired by Robert McKee later on. We’ll also explore a way to analyze dialogue using the tasks and a few other techniques. As we go along, you’ll see why it’s important to think, write, and analyze dialogue at the beat level to build up great scenes, sequences, acts, sub-plots, and finally the global story.

Three Functions of Dialogue

According to Robert McKee, in his book Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen , dialogue has three functions: Exposition, Characterization, and Action.

“Exposition is a literary device used to introduce background information about events, settings, characters, or other elements of a work to the audience or readers. The word comes from the Latin language, and its literal meaning is ‘a showing forth.’ Exposition is crucial to any story, for without it nothing makes sense.” Literary Devices.net

This trick with exposition is that too much information is hard for our brains to process. That’s what gives rise to the exposition is ammunition recommendations all writers hear. A story needs exposition to drive the story forward yet too much will distract, especially in dialogue, from the pace and flow of the story. It’s these fictional or non-fictional facts of the set (character mindset) and setting (environment) that gives the reader what the characters are experiencing and reacting too. It’s important to pace and time your exposition to not reveal too much too soon. You also have to take great care and skill to make the details of the character come alive in unique and novel ways so you keep the reader interested, which leads to another tried and true piece of advice —  remember to show and not to tell.

Characterization

The sum of a character’s traits, values, behaviors, and beliefs. It’s how the author creates the character(s) in the reader’s mind. It’s through characterization that we can see and feel how the character(s) will react and interact.

What a character does — mental, physical, and verbal. Action reveals what cannot be understood otherwise or would sound awkward to describe. Again show don’t tell. The action is what keeps the story interesting and moving along.

Six Tasks of Dialogue

All dialogue must have a purpose and perform one of the three functions. Within these functions, a great beat of dialogue will complete these six tasks (taken from McKee’s Dialogue):

• Express Inner Action (Essential Action in Story Grid terms)
• Action/Reaction
• Conveys Exposition
• Unique Verbal Style

Let’s take a look at each one to see how they build up to great dialogue. For each, I’ll give an example of dialogue that completes the task from this wonderful article Ten Authors Who Write Great Dialogue .

Task #1: Express Inner Action

Each verbal expression requires an internal action to make it happen. These inner actions or essential action in Story Grid terms are how the character responds to the outside world’s stimulus as well as their own past experiences. The interaction of external stimulus and character subtext (past experiences) will create this inner action. This would be the essential action that the character wants to express or the goal they are trying to achieve. The example is from Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy :

‘Drink up,’ said Ford, ‘you’ve got three pints to get through.’

‘Three pints?” said Arthur. ‘At lunchtime?’ 

The man next to Ford grinned and nodded happily. Ford ignored him. He said, ‘Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.’

‘Very deep,’ said Arthur, ‘you should send that in to the Reader’s Digest. They’ve got a page for people like you.’

‘Drink up.’

Ford’s goal is to get Arthur to ‘drink up’, for what reason we don’t know, but for this beat, it’s pretty clear.

Task #2: Action/Reaction

Once a character takes action, there will be a reaction. This action/reaction dance will lead to the ultimate turning point of the scene between the characters. As the tension in a scene builds from beat to beat, so should the dialogue. The dialogue should stir up the emotions of the characters so there will be a desire to express more and more extreme inner actions.

Let’s look again at the same example from Task #1. The Action/Reaction between Ford and Arthur escalates as Arthur complains that it’s too early to drink yet Ford prods him on by saying that ‘Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.’

Task #3: Conveys Exposition

What a character says, does not say, and how they say it will reveal exposition. The revealing of exposition in unique and novel ways is what separates good dialogue from great dialogue. For example, Judy Blume does this to great effect in this piece of dialogue from her book Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Nancy spoke to me as if she were my mother. ‘Margaret dear–you can’t possibly miss Laura Danker. The big blonde with the big you know whats!’

‘Oh, I noticed her right off,’ I said. ‘She’s very pretty.’

‘Pretty!’ Nancy snorted. ‘You be smart and stay away from her. She’s got a bad reputation.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘My brother said she goes behind the A&P with him and Moose.’

‘And,’ Janie added, ‘she’s been wearing a bra since fourth grade and I bet she gets her period.’

To the teenage reader, the line ‘My brother said she goes behind the A&P with him and Moose’ says a lot about Laura Danker and why she has a bad reputation without saying what goes on behind the A&P.

Task #4: Unique Verbal Style

Each character will have a unique verbal style that they used to communicate their inner actions. This verbal style must be appropriate for the set and setting the characters find themselves in. This tone and tenor of their voice along with word choice (or lack of words) must be on theme for the character. The reader must say to themselves, “yeah, they would say that that way.” For this example, we’ll look at Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.

With all due respect,’ my father said, ‘this is not the time or the place for that kind of business. Why don’t you sit down now, and announce your plans after I’ve finished with the sermon? Church is not the place to vote anyone in or out of public office.’

‘Church is the place for it,’ said Tata Ndu. ‘Ici, maintenant, we are making a vote for Jesus Christ in the office of personal God, Kilanga village.’

Father did not move for several seconds.

Tata Ndu looked at him quizzically. ‘Forgive me, I wonder if I have paralyzed you?’

Father found his voice at last. ‘You have not.’ 

Tata’s unique verbal style shows that English is his second language and as such, he means to not offend the priest giving the sermon. Equally unique is the priest that gives this dialogue the contrast it needs to know who is talking.

Task #5: Captivates

Dialogue must do work. It is not normal everyday speech. Great dialogue captivates the reader by being clear, concise, and compelling. There is no shoe leather or wasted words, movements, or expressions. It’s hyper speech in that, as the writer, you can think about every word. 

Looking at the example from Task #4, it’s clear that there is some tension between the characters. There are no wasted words in what Tata wants to accomplish and the tension between Tata and the priest is made more by Tata’s line ‘Forgive me, I wonder if I have paralyzed you?’

Task #6: Authentic

All dialogue must sound like the character would say it. Dialogue that falls flat or does no work will have readers saying “the character in the book would never say that.” An authentic character voice starts with a solid story and character design where the reader knows the character and will anticipate how they will express their inner/essential action. Inner/Essential action comes from a character’s authentic voice. For this task, we’ll look at some dialogue from Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight:

‘You sure have a lot of shit in here. What’s all this stuff? Handcuffs, chains…What’s this can?’

‘For your breath,’ Karen said. ‘You could use it. Squirt some in your mouth.’

‘You devil, it’s Mace, huh? What’ve you got here, a billy? Use it on poor unfortunate offenders…Where’s your gun, your pistol?’

‘In my bag, in the car.’ She felt his hand slip from her arm to her hip and rest there and she said, ‘You know you don’t have a chance of making it. Guards are out here already, they’ll stop the car.’

‘They’re off in the cane by now chasing Cubans.’

His tone quiet, unhurried, and it surprised her.

‘I timed it to slip between the cracks, you might say. I was even gonna blow the whistle myself if I had to, send out the amber alert, get them running around in confusion for when I came out of the hole. Boy, it stunk in there.’

‘I believe it,’ Karen said. ‘You’ve ruined a thirty-five-hundred-dollar suit my dad gave me.’

She felt his hand move down her thigh, fingertips brushing her pantyhose, the way her skirt was pushed up.

‘I bet you look great in it, too. Tell me why in the world you ever became a federal marshal, Jesus. My experience with marshals, they’re all beefy guys, like your big-city dicks.’

‘The idea of going after guys like you,’ Karen said, ‘appealed to me.’

The man character in this dialogue is an outlaw who escaped from prison and would say and do what this character is doing. As for Karen, this bit of dialogue reveals a lot of exposition as well as the type of person a female federal marshal might be.

Five Stages of Talk (Dialogue)

All verbal action and behavior move through stages of steps to come to life. These stages go from desire to antagonism to choice to action to expression. For our purposes, we’re going to use these stages like the five commandments of story to ensure that as we analyze and write dialogue, we have an objective framework to apply (again from McKee’s Dialogue).

What the character wants to achieve in the scene or the essential action or the goal. Mostly, it’s to get back to a life balance that has been disrupted from the status quo or the character’s object of desire. Background desires will limit the character’s choice because they limit what the character will or will not do. More on background desires when we get into the analysis.

#2 Sense of Antagonism

What is preventing the character(s) from getting back to balance? What or who is in their way? The sense of antagonism is what the character is reacting to and is usually who they are dialoguing with.

#3 Choice of Action

The action the character wants to take to get to the desired scene intention based on their desires or inner actions. The choice of action has to be authentic to the character so that the series of possible actions or best bad choices make sense to the reader.

#4 Action/Reaction

The actual or literal action they take be it physical or verbal and the reaction that might occur. Desire is the source of action, and action is the source of dialogue. All are governed by the character’s subtext or past experiences. 

#5 Expression

The verbal action as dialogue coupled with any physical activity that might also express the actions of the character (e.g. narration of expression, physical act like screaming, stepping forward, clenching a fist, etc.). The expression must be authentic to the character and as such, the reaction to the expression by another character(s) will drive the action/reaction to the turning point, crisis, climax, and finally resolution.

Dialogue Analysis

Before we get to the mechanics of writing dialogue, let’s take a look at a framework to analyze existing dialogue so we can better understand its structure. This analysis framework consists of the following:

• Character(s) Agenda + Voice (Macro)
• Pre Beat/Scene Character(s) Subtext (Micro)
• Five Stages of Talk (Micro)
• Post Beat/Scene Character(s) Subtext (Micro)

The first item on this list operates at the macro-level (e.g. scene, sequence, etc) while the last three operate at the micro or beat level.

Character(s) Agenda/Subtext + Voice

Character subtext or past experiences are what drive the expression of dialogue since they are what generate the inner action. A character’s subtext, their authentic voice, and their abilities to manifest action will constrain their expression. These guardrails of expression are what have to be considered when writing character dialogue. This is why it’s vital to have a solid story structure and character studies to guide your character’s dialogue.

A character study is a description of the character that includes age, gender, physical appearance, internal and external struggles, quirks, etc. It’s a great way to ground a character’s dialogue since you want every word that comes out of a character’s mouth to be consistent with who they are and in their voice. It’s also their history along with character traits, values, beliefs, and skills that are the guardrails in which they can express their inner/essential actions. 

A character’s voice will also be unique to them. The more of a contrast in voice between characters, the more tension and the easier the reader can follow who is saying what. If characters have a similar voice (e.g. sound or act the same), it will be harder for readers to keep track. Of course, you can use tags and markers to set off who is talking but as the reader gets to know the characters, it should become extremely clear who the characters are based on what they say and do.

Pre Beat/Scene Character(s) Subtext

The character study above is a macro level synopsis of the traits, values, beliefs, quirks, and skills that a character has. All of these parameters may or may not come into play at the Pre Beat/Scene level since all characters arrive at a beat with a macro-history and micro-history. 

As I mentioned before, the macro history is the guardrails of their action or what will be in character for them to do while the micro-history what happened before the beat/scene they are about to come into. It’s these micro-histories that will shape how the character acts at the moment. For example, if the character comes to the beat tired or hungry, they will have a different action/reaction than if they were fed and well-rested.

Five Stages of Talk

Each beat of a scene should follow the five stages and build on each other. If one or more of the stages is missing or not as strong, the dialogue is not doing its job. Again, dialogue is not real-life speech and it must not meander or build up like people talk in real-life with all the um’s and likes and on the nose exposition that real-life speech can have when a person is trying to figure out what to say. For a character, the writer can bypass all that at the moment thinking to deliver what the character wants to say. Every word must be intentional and mean something to the characters and the story.

Post Beat/Scene Character(s) Subtext

After each beat, the character(s) subtext has changed in some way since their inner action has been expressed or some new exposition has been revealed. These new facts need to be considered for the next beat or scene since it’s the sum of the character(s) experiences. 

Dialogue Analysis Examples

Let’s take a look at a few examples of dialogue and how the analysis framework can be applied.

Example #1 — Fargo

For our first example, we’ll look at the movie Fargo that we analyzed on the Story Grid Roundtable Podcast. I picked this as the first one because it clearly shows the five tasks of dialogue as well as the pre and post beat subtext, which changes substantially from the start to the end of the scene. 

Character(s) Agenda + Voice: Carl and Gaear want to get to the hideout after kidnapping Jean. Carl is a highly-strung, talks too much know-it-all while Gaear is the strong/silent but deadly type.

Pre Beat Subtext: Kidnappers Carl and Gaear are taking their victim Jean to the hideout. They get pulled over on the highway for not having a license plate. Carl and Gaear want to deceive the trooper so he does not find Jean. This scene takes place at 0:27:33 after they get pulled over on the highway.

CARL: How can I help you, Officer?

TROOPER: Is this a new car then sir?

CARL: It certainly is, Officer. Still got that smell

TROOPER: You’re required to display temporary tags, either in the plate area or taped to the inside of the back window.

CARL: Certainly

TROOPER: Can I see your license and registration, please?

CARL: Certainly. Yeah, I was gonna tape up those … The tag. You know, to be in full compliance, but it must have [CARL shows a $50 to the TROOPER] … must have slipped my mind. So maybe the best thing to do would be to take care of that right here in Brainerd.

TROOPER: What’s this sir?

CARL: My license and registration. Yeah, I want to be in compliance. I was just thinking we could take care of it right here, in Brainerd.

TROOPER: Put that back in your pocket please, and step out of the car, please, sir.

[TROOPER hears Jean whimpering. Looks in the back and Gaear smashes his head then shoots him dead.]

CARL: “Whoa. Whoa, Daddy.”

Five Stages :

• Desire: Carl wants to get to the hideout with Jean without being caught.
• The Sense of Antagonism: The Trooper.
• Choice of Action: Carl tries to talk his way out of the trooper sniffing around by hinting at a bribe.
• Action/Reaction: Carl presents his wallet with a $50 sticking out of it. The Trooper senses the bribe and asks Carl to “put that back in your wallet and get out of the car.”
• Expression: Carl looks at Gaear, wondering what to do. Gaear smashes the cop against the car and shoots him dead.

Post Beat Subtext: Gaear killed the trooper and now they need to take care of the body and get out of there quickly. Carl is clearly upset about what happened and now knows, more than before, that Gaear is a psychopath.

Example #2 — Pride & Prejudice

Jane Austin’s Pride & Prejudice is the masterwork in the Love > Courtship genre. Her use of dialogue makes the story flow and gives great scenes like the one below between Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Bennet.

Character(s) Agenda + Voice : Mrs. Bennet wants to marry off one of her daughters to Mr. Bingley. Mrs. Bennet is quite excitable so her voice is high pitched and fast. Mr. Bennet is a serious man but loves to give his wife a hard time since he knows that she’s a gossip.

Pre Beat Subtext : We are introduced to three of the Bennet sisters and how obsessed Mrs. Bennet is with marrying them off to good men so the family can be taken care of.

Dialogue : 

“What is his name?”

“Is he married or single?”

“Oh! Single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”

“How so? How can it affect them?”

“My dear Mr Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome! You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”

“Is that his design in settling here?”

“Design! Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes.”

Five Stages:

• Desire: Mrs. Bennet wants to know more about Mr. Bingley for her daughters.
• The Sense of Antagonism: Mr. Bennet’s apathy to doing so
• Choice of Action: Mrs. Bennet wants to know as much as she can about Mr. Bingley
• Action/Reaction: Mrs. Bennet tells Mr. Bennet that she is thinking that Mr. Bingley would be a good match for one of her daughters. Mr. Bennet is skeptical.
• Expression: Mrs. Bennet wants Mr. Bennet to inquire right away and is adamant about him doing it quickly.

Post Beat Subtext : Mr. Bennet will be pestered by Mrs. Bennet until he goes for a visit to inquire about Mr. Bingley’s status.

How to Format Dialogue

The rules for formatting dialogue are straightforward for 90% or so of the dialogue you’ll write. It’s best to start with the simple and expand as you get better at writing dialogue. There are two formats to consider when writing dialogue — what tag or markers to use and proper punctuation.

Dialogue Tags

A dialogue tag is a small phrase either before, after, or in between the actual dialogue itself to communicate attribution of the dialogue (e.g. who is speaking). The most common tags are said and asked with the most common placement being after the dialogue as in:

“Can you come here?” Jane asked. “I’m on my way,” Jack said.

There is some debate as to the types of tags or a variety of tags that should be used. This centers around whether adding the actions to the characters as opposed to adding the narration after the tag as follows:

“Can you come here?” Jane yelled from the other room. “I’m on my way,” Jack shouted back.

Compare that to:

“Can you come here?” Jane asked. Her voice echoed as she yelled from her home office, which was added last summer. “I’m on my way,” Jack said. His low baritone rattled the windows in Jane’s office.

I don’t think there is any right answer to what to do but I would add that it will depend a lot on what type of pace you want your dialogue to take.

For rapid-fire dialogue, the amount of complexity in the tags and narration will slow it down but also can reveal exposition about the characters as illustrated in the last example.

The set and setting of where the dialogue takes place will affect the tone and tenor between the characters. These variables affect the pace and the variety of pace in a story makes it more interesting and engaging. We’ll talk more about that in how to write captivating dialogue.

Punctuation

Dialogue punctuation rules are simple. There are two parts that need to be punctuated: the actual dialogue, which identifies the words spoken, and the dialogue tag, which identifies who is speaking. The basic rules of dialogue punctuation are as follows:

• Surround your dialogue with quote marks and add a comma before closing the quotes if you’re using tags.
• Create a new paragraph for new speakers.
• Put periods inside of quotation marks when not using dialogue tags.

These basic rules should get you most of the way to properly formatted dialogue. This excellent post from Thinkwritten will get you the rest of the way.

How to Write Dialogue That Captivates Readers

Captivating dialogue is effortless for the reader to read and digest. It never gets in the way, always feels natural, and is in the authentic voice of the character. In order to do that, we’ll apply the captivating dialogue framework to write the dialogue and if needed, we follow that up with the analysis. Not all dialogue you write will require analysis so don’t feel like you have to look at every single beat of dialogue. Rather, save the analysis method for when you’re stuck or the dialogue is not working.

Captivating Dialogue Creation Framework

At the Story Grid, we like frameworks and objective ways to craft stories. For us, this is the best way to have a consistent process of creation, where if we follow the process, we have a better shot at creating a story that works. The same goes for dialogue.

The importance of this process-driven methodology comes to light when a story or beat of dialogue has problems. Since we rely on objective measures, usually we can pinpoint the problem and provide a solution. For dialogue, I propose the following framework:

• Genre Specific Conventions, Scenes, Tropes, and Styles
• Character Studies + Annoying Quirks + Authentic Voice
• Ramp up Conflict + Tension
• Weave Subtext using Exposition
• Balance Dialogue/Narration for Pace
• Read it Aloud
• Analysis when needed

#1 Genre Specific Conventions, Scenes, Tropes, and Styles

All writers need to pick a genre. Genre selection will then lead to the conventions, obligatory scenes, tropes, and styles that readers of the genre are expecting. This list of requirements allows the writer to already have scenes and tropes that will give hints for great dialogue.

For example, if your story is in the Love > Courtship genre, then one of the Obligatory Scenes is when the lovers meet — you can’t have a love story without lovers. The dialogue between the lovers needs to convey some form of either interest or hate or a combination of both. When they talk about the potential suitor to others, the exposition of interest or annoyance or lust comes through in the dialogue. Or in contrast between inner and outer dialogue: what they say to others versus what they admit to themselves. Much of this will depend on the POV you’re using.

In terms of scene tropes, any Crime story usually has a scene in a police car or station house. The words the police use will be in a certain style and readers will expect the good cop/bad cop or a police car ride or an integration scene trope.

#2 Character Studies + Annoying Quirks + Authentic Voice

Once you have settled on your genre, you’ll need to figure out the characters in your story. For convenience, we’ll assume that all stories will have at least a victim, a villain (antagonist), and a hero (protagonist). These three characters will clearly talk to each other at some point and need to have enough of a difference so that it’s clear who is talking even without dialogue tags.

A quick character study of a few paragraphs describing the character along with some character-specific quirks will set the tone for how they speak. It’s always a good idea to have character quirks that annoy other characters so that the tension is built into every interaction. 

For example, in the Fargo scene we looked at before, Carl and Gaear have quirks that get on each other’s nerves. Carl talks too much. He thinks he’s the smartest of the two. Gaear is quiet and reserved but will resort to violence when he is annoyed. This makes Carl nervous so he talks more thus annoying Gaear even more. As the movie progresses (spoiler alert), Carl annoys Gaear to the point where Gaear shoots and kills him. Talk about ramping up the conflict + tension.

#3 Ramp up Conflict + Tension

Dialogue should moderate the pace of the story and the best way to do that is to ramp up the conflict and tension between characters. All dialogue should perform the six tasks and conflict is the best way to accomplish that.

The true nature of a character (and frankly people in real life) are revealed under stress and strain. The inner action that’s under control one minute will suddenly explore out when the conflict or tension is ramped up. Great dialogue will masterfully “power of ten” the conflict and tension to a crisis and climax that will surprise and delight the reader (or viewer).

Another way to think of this conflict and tension ramp is to imagine you’re a director of a movie. The actors are in the scene and you’re trying to visually capture the energy of the scene. At your disposal is the shots the camera can get. Wide shots. Narrow shots. Split shots. Out of focus shots. All of these pieces of the scene can be used to reveal what the characters are doing. The same goes for written dialogue.

Being able to “move the shot” around in your dialogue will give different ways to ramp up the conflict or change the pace. Being specific about a certain detail or use of a word or even a group of people off in the distance can make a difference. That’s what’s done in this Die Hard Scene. Image how you would write this into a script or novel:

HAN GRUBER: [On the radio] You are most troublesome for a security guard.

JOHN MCLANE: [Imitates buzzer] Sorry, Hans. Wrong guess. Would you like to go for double jeopardy where the scores can really change?

HANS GRUBER: Who are you, then?

JOHN MCLANE: Just a fly in the ointment, Hans. A monkey in the wretch. A pain in the ass.

It’s a simple exchange but it ramps up the tension and also reveals John’s character, Han’s character and the exposition that John is going to cause all sorts of trouble for Hans. We don’t know how yet and that’s what makes us want to keep watching.

#4 Weave Subtext using Exposition

When characters are under stress and strain, it’s easier for them to reveal hidden secrets or details that they might not want to reveal. It’s these “oops” moments or a reflective moment that makes great dialogue. These moments are what is meant by using exposition as ammunition to reveal character quirks, subtext, and story details.

The challenge is to not make the exposition reveal too obvious or boring or “on the nose.” That type of dialogue will distract the reader from the story and harms the flow of the story. As an example, look at this passage from Little Red Riding Hood to see how exposition is used to reveal story details.

“You will need to wear the best red cloak I gave you,” the mother said to her daughter. “And be very careful as you walk to grandmother’s house. Don’t veer off the forest path, and don’t talk to any strangers. And be sure to look out for the big bad wolf!”

“Is grandmother very sick?” the young girl asked.

“‘She will be much better after she sees your beautiful face and eats the treats in your basket, my dear.”

“I am not afraid, Mother,” the young girl answered. “I have walked the path many times. The wolf does not frighten me.”

This beat of dialogue foreshadows what is to come and while maybe not as subtle as it could be, it gives the reader the necessary background to create tension as the girl sets off to grandma’s house.

#5 Balance Dialogue/Narration for Pace

Dialogue does not live in a vacuum. It needs narration to give subtext, explain the physical world, and to set up the situations our characters find themselves in. While there are no hard fast rules on the split between dialogue text and narration text, I did a brief study of 14 books from Project Gutenberg . See below for the statistics.

A perfect split between dialogue words and narration words would be 50%. Anything below 50% would be more narration. Anything above 50% would be more dialogue. As you can see from the sample, there tends to be, on average, more narration than dialogue. This intuitively makes sense since narration sets up dialogue and most dialogue uses tags or markers to set it off. My guess is that the Dialogue/Narration ratio will depend on the genre, so take these numbers as such.

Another consideration on the Dialogue/Narration spectrum is the pace of the story. In general, the more narration in a scene, the slower the pace while more dialogue will tend to make the pace faster. That’s one of the reasons that dialogue is not real-life speech. It is stylized speech in which the author, through the characters, has a purpose for each word. When dialogue hits its mark, the pace of the story quickens because all of the sub-text, narration setup, and stylization reveals the character(s) inner action in the least amount of words.

When writing dialogue, it’s good to mix up the dialogue/narration ratio so that the reader can feel the pace quicken or take a break to internalize and synthesize what just happened. This variety in dialogue will keep readers interested and yearning to find out what happens next since story is about change and the way a story changes should be varied.

#6 Read it Aloud

Nothing gives you a better sense of the tone, tenor, and pace of dialogue like reading aloud, preferably in each character’s unique voice and accent (if present). Reading dialogue aloud will connect the words on the page with the processing in your brain. What I mean by this is that when you verbalize dialogue, your attention is heightened because you have to read then speak. That’s a different pathway than the normal shortcuts most people take while reading, skipping connector words or full-on sentences.

#7 Analysis When Needed

Not all of the dialogue you write will need a detailed analysis discussed above. My guess is that the more dialogue you write, the better you’ll naturally ask yourself the important questions about raising the conflict by power of ten, revealing exposition, keeping a consistent character voice, and distilling the words characters say into tight interactions.

If you do get stuck, then doing the analysis will get you unstuck. Remember that dialogue that’s not working is usually rooted in a fundamental story problem and my guess is that the analysis will reveal an underlying story problem that will need to be fixed.

Pitfalls to Look Out For

Most dialogue pitfalls come from not setting up the subtext enough so that the characters can express their inner action in their authentic voice. Usually, it’s obvious when the exchange is read aloud but sometimes the writer can get so consumed with the process that even an aloud read can’t find it.

The analysis framework will likely catch any problem but as I mentioned before, it can be cumbersome to apply to all your beats of dialogue. That’s why I have come up with a couple of spot checks for your dialogue to quickly catch the majority of the pitfalls that writers run into.

• Confusion on Who’s Talking : This is especially problematic with more than two people talking. Use the tags liberally to get the flow and then fine-tune in later drafts.
• Cursing : Too much cursing takes away from the power of the words and will bore the reader. That does not mean that a well-placed f-bomb will not hit the mark.
• Improper use of Period Speech/Mixing of Speech: If you’re writing period pieces, then getting the words right matters.
• Misusing Humor: Humor is hard to write and should be used sparingly unless you’re writing a comedy. Pay particular attention to jokes that are meant to break the tension since those are the hardest.
• Variety of Dialogue Tags : Don’t get carried away with having to mix up different dialogue tags. When in doubt, use said and asked. Having too many different dialogue tags can wear out the reader.
• On the Nose Dialogue: Avoid stating the obvious or what the characters already know. This is the classic telling problem where the action of the character is more important than them telling the other character what they are doing.

Your best tool for catching dialogue problems will be reading it aloud over and over again so that you get the tone and tenor of the character’s authentic voice down cold. It’s also good practice to step away from the dialogue so you can look at it fresh after doing something completely different.

Dialogue Writing Prompts

The framework above is a good way to create dialogue once you have an idea. Sometimes, those ideas are hard to come by. That’s why having a few go-to writing prompts will make the creation process a little easier. The best resource I found for prompts comes from Daily Writing Tips and their post 70 Dialogue Writing Prompts . At the end of the post, they also have a list of additional resources for even more prompts. The ones I have listed below are a sample of what Daily Writing Tips has as well as the other resources. The sources are denoted in brackets.

• “Ma’am, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. Please, sit down.” [Daily Writing Tips]
• “This is going to be way harder than we thought.” [Daily Writing Tips]
• “Oh man, I’ve had the worst day ever.” [Daily Writing Tips]
• “You must have misheard me.” [Daily Writing Tips]
• “If you could just set it down – very slowly – and then back away.” [Daily Writing Tips]
• “Do you maybe think, in retrospect, that this was a terrible idea?” [Daily Writing Tips]
• “I’m so sick of all this gloom and doom. Why can’t people just be happy?” [ Marylee McDonald ]
• “You’re going in there right now and apologize.” [Marylee McDonald]
• “I’m asking because I’ve seen the way you look at me.” [ A Cure for Writer’s Block ]
• “Will you stay the night?” [A Cure for Writer’s Block]
• “I want to spend the little time I have left with you and only you.” [A Cure for Writer’s Block]
• “Sometimes, being a complete nerd comes in handy.” [ Chrmdpoet ]
• “How much of that did you hear?” [Chrmdpoet]
• “People are staring.” [Chrmdpoet]

Hopefully, you won’t need to use too many prompts. Again, dialogue problems are usually story problems so if your story structure and character design is solid, then your dialogue should follow. If you get stuck and can’t figure a way out, then read one of the masterworks in your genre for inspiration. Chances are, those stories will inspire you and get you past your block. 

The Golden Rule of Dialogue

Dialogue problems are story problems. If you feel that your dialogue is weak or lackluster, chances are, your story fundamentals are not in place. Luckily, you’re reading this on the Story Grid and we can help.

The Story Grid is a framework for telling better stories. It exists to help writers objectively evaluate their stories to see what’s working and what’s not. The best place to start is the editor’s six core questions and the five commandments of story . These macro and micro tools will give you some keen insights into where your dialogue problems are coming from.

If you’re like me, then most of your dialogue problems will come from not setting up scenes properly (five commandments), character development (wants and needs), and moving the story forward (conventions and obligatory scenes).

Clear, concise, and compelling dialogue is achievable the same way you write a great story — by starting out with a clear, concise, and compelling framework. A framework like the Story Grid can help give you objective measures of how well your story works so you can learn how to write dialogue that flows naturally from your character’s authentic voice.

Special thanks to Kim Kessler for reviewing this post and providing some great feedback.

• Robert McKee: Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen
• James Scott Bell: How to Write Dazzling Dialogue
• Marcy Kennedy: A Busy Writer’s Guide to Dialogue
• Sammie Justesen: Dialogue for Writers

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How to Write Dialogue: 3 Effective Ways to Write Dialogue

POSTED ON Sep 4, 2020

Written by Gloria Russell

Learning how to write dialogue is one of the hardest things to write well, but it’s also vital to telling an impactful story.

If you’re writing a novel or even if you're writing a nonfiction book , nailing dialogue is key to maintaining tone, characterization, and pacing in your story. 

We’re going to go over what dialogue is, how to hit it out of the park, and tips that you can apply to your own stories–no matter what genre you’re writing in! 

This guide teaches how to write a dialogue, including:

What is dialogue?

Dialogue is defined as a conversation between two or more characters in a written work, be that a play, book, movie, or stage production. That’s it–if you’ve got characters in your story and they’re having a spoken conversation, you’ve got dialogue.

Here’s an example of a dialogue exchange between two imaginary characters: “How’s it goin’?” Smith asked.  

Rosa sighed. “I suppose I’m alright, but I’ve had a dreadful day.” 

“Aw, that’s too bad. C’mon, let’s get milkshakes.” 

As in the example above, quotation marks are often used to notate dialogue, but not always.

Some authors like James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy take the stylistic liberty of removing the quotation marks from their dialogue.

Here’s an example of dialogue without quotation marks from McCarthy’s novel, The Road. 

Hi, Papa, he said.

I'm right here.

Without the quotation marks, the reader uses context and voice to determine who’s talking, which we’ll talk about in more detail later on.

For new writers, it’s generally best to keep the quotations in, as it can become confusing to readers to take out punctuation without a clear reason for doing so. 

How to write dialogue

So, a conversation between characters. Easy, right? 

Many people think that learning how to write a dialogue is as simple as writing a descriptive paragraph about a character's appearance or even writing about the thoughts they are having in their head. But it's more than that.

If you've ever set down to write a dialogue and make it sound authentic, you already know that writing a conversation between multiple characters can be strangely challenging. So, now that we’ve talked about what dialogue is and what it’s for, let’s talk about how to write dialogue that actually sounds real – and true to your characters.

Related: Narrative Writing Prompts

1. Mimic real people… sort of 

Your characters should be fleshed out like real people, regardless of your genre, and they should act like real people in your story. By extension, they should also talk like real people. 

What’s the most effective way to convey dialogue that’s realistic? Mimic real conversations. 

Sort of. 

See, you should indeed listen to people talking to get an idea of how conversations flow, nonverbal cues, and voice. But if you were to write down word-for-word a conversation between two people, you’d likely find that it’s incoherent.

But real-world conversations go in circles, dive off on tangents, and ramble. Unless that's a character trait you want to intentionally include, we don’t want that stuff in our fiction. 

Not sure what I mean?

Go listen in to a conversation at your local coffee shop. Listen to how often someone gets interrupted or goes on a separate tangent. 

So yes, DO listen to real-world conversations for flow and voice to learn how to write dialogue like a pro. Different people from different backgrounds notice and observe things in unique ways. And this has the ability to enhance your characters' dialogue.

But pay attention to what can be cut out of those conversations. 

Then, find the best of both worlds. Take the body language, flow, and distinct voice from real-world conversations and apply them to fiction. Omit the changes in structure and lack of clarity that simply won't enhance your writing.

It’s a tough balancing act, but it makes for dynamic, realistic dialogue. 

Related: 4 Ways to Improve Your Writing Skills

2. Give each character a distinct voice 

Like we mentioned before, it’s important to use real-world examples of conversations to help you understand how to get across a character’s voice. 

But what is their voice? 

In this section, we aren’t talking about narrative voice or even the tones in your writing . The narrative voice is the prose itself, the narrative point of view that describes the events happening. Here, we’re talking about the voice that individual characters have. 

Let’s look at the example we used earlier when we discussed quotation marks. 

“How’s it goin’?” Smith asked.  

Rosa sighed. “I suppose I’m alright, but I’ve had a dreadful day.”  

These two characters have very different voices. The first speaker, Smith, uses slang and abbreviations when he talks. His manner of speech is much more casual and laid-back. Rosa, on the other hand, uses words with a more formal inflection. ‘Dreadful’ and ‘suppose’ point to someone who’s more uptight, more verbose. 

Without any extra background information on either character, we already have an idea of what they’re like based on their voice. And when we get to the last line, we know that it’s Smith talking, because it matches up with the voice we’ve established on the first line. 

One common mistake new writers make is having all their characters sound the same.

But people aren’t like that! Your characters are all different, unique people, and they should sound like it. A kid who grew up lower class in a big city will talk differently than a wealthy kid from a suburban town. A serf from the countryside won’t talk the same way as the king. 

Ideally, you should know which character is speaking based solely on the way they’re talking. 

Consider who your characters are. Where did they grow up? Who do they hang out with? What are the sorts of things they prioritize, and how does that impact not only what they talk about, but how they talk about it? 

3. Think about how the conversation moves the story forward

We talked about how learning how to write dialogue in fiction shouldn’t necessarily mirror the chaotic structure of real-world conversations. It needs to be believable, but in, truth, it will be more structured and planned.

Basically, this means you should treat your dialogue the same way you treat everything else in your story: it should serve a purpose, it should move the storyline forward, and it should be interesting. 

Dialogue should happen for a reason. It should be motivated.

Characters should have a reason to talk–this might sound obvious, but failing to recognize this can result in some clunky dialogue.

Take exposition, for example.

A common exposition mistake new writers make is having their characters deliver exposition–especially in fantasy, when the author is trying to impart details about their world to the reader.

Let’s take a look at an imaginary dialogue exchange: 

“We’re having wonderful weather,” Ava said. 

Ned nodded. “We always have wonderful spring weather. Our two suns make it so that it never gets too cold here on our planet, and our spring seasons are long and prosperous.” 

Take a look at Ned’s dialogue. If these characters are from this planet, they wouldn’t be talking like this. And even if they are, the sentence reads flat and stilted, more like an excerpt from an encyclopedia than a piece of dialogue. 

When you’re writing dialogue, consider what it is that the characters are trying to convey. If you’re just using them as a mouthpiece for your own exposition, maybe reconsider. 

It’s also okay to skip over some character interactions. You don’t have to document every single minute of an exchange. Instead of typing out everything two people say, stick to the specific interactions that have to do with the plot. 

We’ll talk more about small talk later, but as a rule of thumb for fiction that also applies to dialogue: if you’re bored writing it, the reader’s probably bored reading it. Keep your dialogue motivated and important. 

4. Cut the small talk 

This one builds on point three of learning how to write a dialogue. But we're going to stay here a bit because it's important – and because a common mistake of new authors is including too much small talk in their novel. 

When learning how to write dialogue, just remember that small talk is not necessary (and doesn't make for great writing).

When people get together, especially strangers, there’s often small talk involved. True. We ask each other questions about the weather and make idle conversation to break the ice for more important topics. 

But this is fiction. And in fiction, we get to skip all that! Yay! 

We don’t need to read every word your characters say to each other when they meet up. We don’t need to hear them describe the weather to each other, or try to talk about sports. Unless it’s absolutely vital to the scene, we don’t need to hear about it.

5. Remember to indent for clarity

This may seem like a simple thing, but your book formatting matters hugely when it comes to dialogue.

New authors often don’t know when to hit enter and start a new paragraph, and this can result in long paragraphs where multiple people are talking.

It becomes unclear who is saying what. 

Plus, usually, long paragraphs make reading retention difficult.

There’s a simple rule of thumb to keep in mind: you should start a new paragraph when a new idea is introduced. 

Let’s reference a quick made-up example: 

“I don’t know where he went,” said Clark. “Well, he couldn’t have gone far,” said Synthia. She looked over her shoulder. “Elizabeth! Do you know where Matt went?” “No,” said Elizabeth. “Drat.” Clark folded his arms. 

We have four characters here, three whom are in the scene. The lines of dialogue aren’t correctly spaced out, so it’s difficult to tell who’s talking – and when. On the last line, it’s entirely unclear who says “drat,” for example. 

So how do we fix this? Simple! Just add a new paragraph break every time a new character speaks. 

“I don’t know where he went,” Clark said. 

“Well, he couldn’t have gone far,” said Synthia. She looked over her shoulder. “Hey, Elizabeth! Do you know where Matt went?” 

“No,” said Elizabeth. 

“Drat.” Clark folded his arms. 

Because we’ve properly spaced out our dialogue, we can now clearly see who’s saying what. Not only that, but having it formatted like this is just plain easier on the eyes, and much more inviting to a reader than a block of text. 

Don’t make it harder than it has to be! Format your dialogue correctly. 

6. Be careful with dialogue tags 

Dialogue tags are super important. They let us know who’s talking, and they offer a space for characters to move around during conversations.

But abusing them can ruin the flow of dialogue. For example, let’s look at this exchange: 

“I can’t believe it,” Dennis said. 

“I thought you knew,” Sandra said. 

“I thought you loved me!” Dennis said. 

“I do still love you,” Sandra said. 

In this example, overusing the same dialogue tag and format makes the exchange dull when it should be dramatic.

If you have two characters talking for a prolonged period of time, try dropping dialogue tags altogether and punctuating with action to pack a bigger punch.

Let’s try that exchange again, but with a little more attention to dialogue tags: 

Dennis balled his fists. “I can’t believe it.” 

“I thought you knew.” Sandra blinked back tears. 

“I thought you loved me!” 

“I do still love you.” 

Taking out those dialogue tags makes the dialogue read much more smoothly, and the addition of action beats helps set the tone so the words themselves can carry more weight. 

Try practicing with removing your dialogue tags and letting your character’s voices and actions drive the scene! 

7. Approach accents and foreign languages with caution 

Before we wrap up, let’s touch briefly on accents and foreign languages. This is especially important when it comes to learning how to write dialogue, but most people miss the mark on this one.

First, accents. 

There’s a lot of debate surrounding accents. Some people believe they can be spelled phonetically, and some believe they should never be spelled out, ever. 

This depends largely on your story and on what the spelling achieves–if every character has an accent, for example, reading it spelled phonetically might become cumbersome to read. If only one character has a few lines in an accent, that might be less pervasive, but it might still be confusing or unintentionally comical. 

For an alternative to spelling out accents, try introducing the character’s accent when you introduce the character. For example: 

“Good morning,” John said. He spoke with a bright Irish accent. “How are you?” 

Another point of controversy is how foreign languages should be handled in dialogue: specifically, many writers wonder whether they ought to italicize words in other languages.

 This is a huge and ongoing debate, so we won’t get into all of it here, but if you’re wondering which route to take, do some research and reading within your genre to see what the conventions are, and why those conventions exist, so you can make an informed decision. 

Go write some dialogue!

Whatever your genre, keeping these tips and tricks in mind will help you make your dialogue shine.

If you’re a new writer, hopefully this has given you a great jumping-off point to improve your prose, and if you’re a seasoned expert, we hope you’ve found some great tips and tricks to take your dialogue up a notch. 

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How to Write Dialogue That Captivates Your Reader

If your writing bores you, it’ll put your reader to sleep. 

And unfortunately, your first reader will be an agent or an editor. 

Your job is to make every word count—the only way to keep your reader riveted until the end, which is no small task.

Riveting dialogue is your friend because it can accomplish so many things:

• It breaks up narrative summary.
• It differentiates characters (through dialect and word choice ).
• It moves the story, showing without telling.

But writing dialogue well is not easy. If your dialogue is bloated or obvious or telling, readers won’t stay with you long.

• How to Write Effective Dialogue in 6 Steps
• Cut to the Bone
• Reveal Backstory
• Reveal Character
• Read Your Dialogue Out Loud
• Create a “Make My Day” Moment

How to Write Dialogue: Step 1. Cut to the Bone

Unless you’re including them to reveal a character as a brainiac or a blowhard, omit needless words from dialogue.

Obviously, you wouldn’t render a conversation the way a court transcript includes repetition and even um, ah, uh, etc.

See how much you can chop while virtually communicating the same point. It’s more the way real people talk anyway.

“What do you want to do this Sunday? I thought w We could go to the amusement park.”

“I was thinking about renting a rowboat,” Vladimir said. “On one of the lakes.”

“Oh, Vladimir, that sounds wonderful! I’ve never gone rowing before.”

That doesn’t mean all your dialogue has to be choppy—just cut the dead wood.

You’ll be surprised by how much power it adds.

How to Write Dialogue Step 2. Reveal Backstory

Layering in backstory via dialogue helps keep your reader engaged.

Hinting at some incident introduces a setup that demands a payoff.

As they headed toward the house, Janet whispered, “Can we not bring up Cincinnati?”

Maggie shot her a double take. “Believe me, I don’t want that any more than you do.”

“Good,” Janet said. “I mean—”

“Can we not talk about it, please?”

What normal reader wouldn’t assume they will talk about it and stay with the story until they do?

As the story progresses , reveal more and more about your protagonist’s past.

This offers setups that should engage your reader, and it allows you to avoid relying on cliched flashbacks .

How to Write Dialogue Step 3. Reveal Character

Your reader learns a lot about your characters through dialogue.

You don’t have to TELL us they’re sarcastic, witty, narcissistic, kind, or anything else.

You can SHOW us by how they interact and by what they say.

How to Write Dialogue Step 4. Be Subtle

Dialogue offers a number of ways to powerfully understate things.

Here are three:

1. Subtext: Where people say other than what they mean.

Cindy falls in love with the slightly older boy next door, who sees her as just a little sister type.

When she gets to high school, Tommy is already captain of the football team, dating the head cheerleader, and largely ignoring Cindy. 

Tommy leaves for college and word soon gets back to Cindy during her senior year of high school that he and his girlfriend have broken up.

So when he comes home after his freshman year of college and is changing a tire on his car, Cindy just happens to walk outside. She strikes up a conversation with Tommy, and he looks up, stunned. Who is this beauty—little Cindy from next door?

She says, “Making a change, are you?”

Tommy looks at the tire and back at her and says, “Yeah, I actually am making a change.”

Cindy says, “Well, I’ve heard that rotating can be a good thing.”

And he says, “Yeah, I’ve heard that too.”

That’s subtext . They’re not saying what they really mean. They’re not really talking about changing the tire, are they?

2. Sidestepping: When a character responds to a question by ignoring it.

Instead, he offers a whole new perspective.

In the movie Patch Adams , the late Robin Williams played a brilliant young doctor who believes the Old Testament adage that “laughter is the best medicine.”

In the children’s cancer ward he wears an inflated surgical glove on his head, making him look like a rooster. He wears bedpans for shoes and stomps about, flapping his arms and squawking.

The children find it hilarious, but hospital directors consider it undignified and demand he stop.

Patch is trying to make one girl in particular—a hospital volunteer—laugh. But while everyone else thinks he’s funny, she never cracks a smile.

Finally, Patch leaves the hospital to open a clinic in the country. Imagine his surprise when that humorless young lady appears to help him set up.

At one point, she goes outside to rest, so Patch follows and sits opposite her. He says, “I’ve got to ask. Everybody thinks I’m hysterical, but you. I’ve tried everything. Why don’t you ever think anything I say is funny?”

After several seconds, she says, “Men have liked me all my life…all my life…” And we realize by the way she says it, she was abused as a child.

Suddenly, we understand what this girl is all about. She doesn’t trust men, and she doesn’t laugh, because life isn’t funny.

She had not really answered his question. Her problem had nothing to do with him or his humor.

Finally, Patch realizes that some things aren’t funny. Some things you just don’t make fun of. 

It’s a great turnaround in the story. And an example of sidestep dialogue.

Silence truly can be golden.

Many, including Abraham Lincoln, have been credited with the line: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

One of the toughest things to learn as a writer is to avoid filling silent gaps.

Just like we shouldn’t tell what’s not happening in a story, neither do we need to write that someone didn’t respond or didn’t answer.

If you don’t say they did, the reader will know they didn’t.

“Well, John,” Linda said, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

John set his jaw and stared out the window.

“I’m waiting,” she said.

He lit a cigarette.

Linda shook her head. “I swear, John, honestly.”

Too many writers feel the need to write here, “But he refused to say anything,” or “But he never responded.”

Don’t! We know, we get it—and it’s loud, effective, silent dialogue.

Saying nothing, John is actually saying everything.

How to Write Dialogue Step 5. Read Your Dialogue Out Loud

One way to be certain your dialogue flows is to read it aloud or even act it out.

Anything that doesn’t sound right won’t read right either, so rewrite it until it does.

How to Write Dialogue Step 6. Create a “Make My Day” Moment

Certain iconic lines of dialogue have become as legendary as the films and books they originate from:

• “Frankly my dear…”
• “There’s no place like home.”
• “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”
• “To my big brother George, the richest man in town.”
• “What we have here is failure to communicate.”
• “Go ahead, make my day.”
• “May the force be with you.”
• “Houston, we have a problem.”
• “Run, Forrest, run!”
• “You had me at hello.”

Most writers—even bestselling novelists—never create such an unforgettable line of dialogue. But striving to create one is worth the effort.

Ironically, iconic dialogue should fit so seamlessly it doesn’t draw attention to itself until fans begin quoting it.

• How to Format Dialogue

1. Use Dialogue Tags

Attribution tags— he said, she said, etc.—are usually all you need to indicate who’s speaking, so resist the urge to get creative.

Teachers who urge you to find alternatives are usually unpublished and believe agents and editors will be impressed.

Trust me, they won’t be.

Avoid mannerisms of attribution. People say things. They don’t wheeze, gasp, sigh, laugh, grunt, or snort them.

They might do any of those things while saying them, which might be worth mentioning, but the emphasis should be on what is said, and readers just need to know who is saying it.

Keep it simple. All those other descriptors turn the spotlight on an intrusive writer.

Sometimes people whisper or shout or mumble , but let their choice of words indicate they’re grumbling, etc.

If it’s important that they sigh or laugh, separate that action from the dialogue.

Jim sighed. “I can’t take this anymore.”

Not: Jim sighed, “I can’t take this anymore.”

Though you read them in school readers and classic fiction, attribution tags such as replied , retorted , exclaimed, and declared have become clichéd and archaic.

You’ll still see them occasionally, but I suggest avoiding them.

Often no attribution is needed.

Use dialogue tags only when the reader wouldn’t otherwise know who’s speaking.

I once wrote an entire novel , The Last Operative , without attributing a single line of dialogue. 

Not a said , an asked , anything.

I made clear through action who was speaking, and not one reader, even my editor, noticed.

Jordan shook his head and sighed. “I’ve had it.”

Another common error is having characters address each other by name too often.

Real people rarely do this, and it often seems planted only to avoid a dialogue tag. Fictional dialogue should sound real.

Don’t start your dialogue attribution tag with said. 

…said Joe or … said Mary reads like a children’s book. Substitute he and she for the names and that will make it obvious: …said he or said she just doesn’t sound right.

Rather, end with said for the most natural sound: …Joe said or …Mary said.

Resist the urge to explain, and give the reader credit.

The amateur writer often writes something like this:

“I’m beat,” exclaimed John tiredly.

Besides telling and not showing—violating a cardinal rule of writing—it uses the archaic exclaimed for said , misplaces that before the name rather than after, and adds the redundant tiredly (explaining something that needs no explanation) .

The pro would write:

John dropped onto the couch. “I’m beat.”

That shows rather than tells, and the action ( dropped onto the couch ) tells who’s speaking.

2. How to Punctuate Dialogue

Few things expose a beginner like incorrect punctuation, especially in dialogue.

Agents and editors justifiably wonder if you read dialogue, let alone whether you can write it, if you write something like: “I don’t know.” she said. Or, “What do you think?” He said.

To avoid common mistakes:

• When dialogue ends with a question or exclamation mark, the dialogue tag following the quotation marks should be lowercase:  “I’m glad you’re here!” she said.
• When one character’s dialogue extends to more than one paragraph, start each subsequent paragraph with a double quotation mark, and place your closing double quotation mark only at the end of the final paragraph.
• Place punctuation inside the quotation marks, the dialogue tag outside: “John was just here asking about you,” Bill said.
• Put the attribution after the first clause of a compound sentence: “Not tonight,” he said, “not in this weather.”
• Action before dialogue requires a separate sentence: Anna shook her head. “I can’t believe she’s gone!”
• Quoting within a quote requires single quotation marks: “Lucy, Mom specifically said, ‘Do not cut your bangs,’ and you did it anyway!”
• When action or attribution interrupts dialogue, use lowercase as dialogue resumes: “That,” she said, “hurt bad.”

3.  Every New Speaker Requires a New Paragraph

Here’s how I handled a conversation between Brady, one of my lead characters, and his attorney, in my novel Riven :

Ravinia sat shaking her head and telling him all the reasons it would never fly. Rules, regulations, protocol, procedure, no exceptions, and the list went on and on. “I’m not going to pursue this for you, Brady.”

“Yes, you are. I can tell.”

“You can’t tell it by me. Have you been listening? It’s impossible…”

“But you’ll try.”

Ravinia rolled her eyes. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.” 

“Sure you would. You know everything, and you’ve been working inside the system a long time.”

“I’d be laughed out of here,” she said.

“Just tell me you’ll try.”

“Brady, really, be serious. Think this through. Can you imagine the warden going for this? Huh-uh. No way.”

“I like your idea of starting with the warden,” he said.

“I said no such thing.”

“Start at the top; go right to the man.” …

“Brady, don’t ask me to do this.”

“I’m asking.”

• Additional Dialogue Examples

Example #1  

If you’re old enough to remember the original Twilight Zone (hosted by Rod Serling) or Dragnet (starring and narrated by Jack Webb), you know how dialogue set the tone for their shows.

Serling was sometimes whimsical, sometimes mysterious, but always provocative. “Consider one middle-aged adult, lost in space and time…”

Jack Webb, as L.A. police detective Sergeant Joe Friday, was always deadly serious and monotone. “Just the facts, ma’am.”

Contrast those with the dialogue between Tom and his Aunt Polly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

“There! I mighta thought of that closet. What you been doing in there?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing! Look at your hands. And look at your mouth. What IS that truck?”

“I don’t know, aunt.”

“Well, I know. It’s jam—that’s what it is. Forty times I’ve said if you didn’t let that jam alone I’d skin you. Hand me that switch.”

The switch hovered in the air—the peril was desperate—

“My! Look behind you, aunt!”

The old lady whirled round and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled on the instant, scrambled up the highboard fence, and disappeared over it.

Such dialogue sets the tone for the entire story and clearly differentiates characters.

Example #3 

In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain delineates between the Southern white boy and Jim, the runaway slave, by hinting at their respective accents.

Twain doesn’t need to tell who’s speaking, yet the reader never confuses the two.

“Jim, did y’all ever see a king?”

Y’all is the only word in that sentence that implies a Southern accent, but it’s enough.

“I sho enough did.”

“You liar, Jim. You never seen no king.”

“I seen foh kings in a deck of cards.”

Huck’s grammar and Jim’s sho and foh are the only hints of their dialects.

Too much phonetic spelling would have slowed the reading.

Good dialogue can condense a character’s backstory:

A woman in a restaurant whispers to her lunchmate, “You know who that is over there, don’t you?” 

The other says, “No, who?” 

“That’s just it. She’s had so much work done, you don’t recognize her. That’s Betty Lou Herman.” 

“No.” 

“Yeah, she’s had her nose done, her cheeks lifted, and a hair transplant.” 

“Why?” 

“She’s going into politics.” 

“Seriously, that’s really her?” 

In that brief exchange, backstory is layered in, showing where there would otherwise have been too much narrative summary in the form of telling. 

Example #5  

Allow readers to experience the enjoyment of having a story naturally emerge rather than spelling out every detail. 

Instead of writing clunky dialogue like this: 

“Just because you’re in this hospital because you were nearly killed in that wreck when Bill was driving, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t forgive him.”

“What are you going to do about Bill? He feels terrible.” 

“He ought to.” 

“Well, has he visited?” 

“He wouldn’t dare.” 

What actually happened, and why, can emerge in further realistic dialogue as the story progresses. If you were walking past a hospital room and heard this conversation, they wouldn’t be spelling the whole thing out like the first example did. In a normal conversation between two characters — not there only to dump information on the reader — you’d have to deduce what’s going on. 

That’s part of the fun of being a reader — participating in the experience.

In real life, we repeat ourselves for emphasis, but that should be trimmed from written dialogue. 

Instead of a wordy exchange like this:

“Well, this may be one of my craziest mistakes ever.”

“Why is that, Pa?”

“This may be my craziest mistake ever.”

“Why, Pa?”

The words are virtually the same, in the same order, but there are fewer of them, rendering the sentences more powerful.

• The Cardinal Sin of Dialogue

No shortcuts will turn you into a bestselling author, but writers often ask me for that Yoda-esque bit of wisdom “you’d give me if you could tell me only one thing…”

So here it is: avoid on-the-nose dialogue .

It’s not magic, but if you can get a handle on this amateur writing pitfall, you’ll instantly have a leg up on your competition.

On-the-nose may sound like a positive thing — which it would be if related to marksmanship or  academics, but for our purposes it’s a term coined by Hollywood producers and scriptwriters for prose that mirrors real life without advancing the story. It’s one of the most common mistakes I see in otherwise good writing. Even the pros often fall into it.

An example:  

Paige’s phone chirped, telling her she had a call. She slid her bag off her shoulder, opened it, pulled out her cell, hit the Accept Call button, and put it to her ear.

“This is Paige,” she said.

“Hey, Paige.”

She recognized her fiancé’s voice. “Jim, darling! Hello!”

“Where are you, Babe?”

“Just got to the parking garage.”

“No more problems with the car then?”

“Oh, the guy at the gas station said he thinks it needs a wheel alignment.”

“Good. We still on for tonight?”

“Looking forward to it, Sweetie.”

“Did you hear about Alyson?”

“No, what about her?”

• How to Write More Believable Dialogue

Here’s the way that scene should be rendered:

Paige’s phone chirped. It was her fiancé, Jim, and he told her something about one of their best friends that made her forget where she was.

“Cancer?” she whispered, barely able to speak. “I didn’t even know Alyson was sick. Did you?”

Trust me, not a single reader will wonder how she knew the caller was Jim. Does anyone need to be told that:

• the chirp told her she had a call? 
• her phone is in her purse?
• her purse is over her shoulder?
• she has to open it to get her phone?
• she has to push a button to take a call?
• one needs to put the phone to her ear to hear and to speak? 
• she identifies herself to the caller?

Those who love you might also love that kind of writing, praising you for describing every real life detail of answering a cell phone.

It shows you can exactly mirror real life. Good for you. Don’t beat yourself up over it; we’ve all done it. Just quit it. :) Leave it to the amateurs. 

Separate yourself from your competition by recognizing and deleting minutiae like that.

Dig deep. Go past the surface. Mine your emotions, your mind and heart and soul.

Remember what it felt like when you got news like that about someone you deeply cared about, and take the reader with you on the journey you promised them when they picked up your story. Let them hear Paige’s response: “Jim, let me give you a raincheck on tonight. I need to see her.” 

Apply to your own dialogue the principles and tools I’ve outlined here, and I believe you’ll immediately see a compelling difference in your own prose. 

Are You Making This #1 Amateur Writing Mistake?

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How to write dialogue: 7 steps for great conversation

Learning how to write dialogue in a story is crucial. Writing gripping conversations that include conflict and disagreement and further your story will make readers want to read on. Here are 7 steps to improve your dialogue writing skills:

• Post author By Jordan
• 4 Comments on How to write dialogue: 7 steps for great conversation

7 steps to write better dialogue:

• Learn how to format dialogue
• Include conflict and disagreement
• Involve characters’ goals, fears and desires
• Include subtext for subtle gestures and effects
• Involve context for tone and atmosphere
• Learn by copying out great dialogue writing

Let’s expand these ideas:

1. Learn how to format dialogue

You should always leave your reader caught up in your dialogue, not lost in it. Good formatting is key to making dialogue enjoyable and effortless to read [that’s why formatting is the focus of Week 1 of our writing course,  How to Write Dialogue ].

Here are some guidelines for how to write dialogue for maximum clarity:

a) Every time you change speaker, start a new, indented line

Follow this convention because it’s all too easy to lose track of who’s saying what in dialogue.  An example of good format:

“What were you thinking?” Sarah frowned.

“I wasn’t. Thinking, I mean,” Tom admitted.

b) Always use opening and closing speech marks

If you write in US English, it’s standard to use double quotation marks for dialogue. In UK English, single quotation marks suffice.

There is an exception: If you have the same character speaking across multiple paragraphs, uninterrupted (if a character is telling a long story), use an opening speech mark for each paragraph and only use a closing speech mark at the end of the last paragraph before narration resumes or another character speaks.

c) Place all dialogue punctuation  inside speech marks

In the above example, the question mark in Sarah’s dialogue comes before the closing speech marks, not after.

If the end of a line of dialogue is also the end of the sentence, place the period or full stop before the closing speech marks because it’s part of the rhythm of the speech. It’s part of character’s own coming to a stop (it doesn’t lie outside their speech):

“That’s your problem,” Sarah chided, “you only ever rely on your gut.”

The best policy when formatting dialogue is to check published books and compare multiple dialogue extracts. Investigate what the most common practice is in books by published authors in your country, and remember to be similarly consistent. For other ideas on how to format dialogue, read our dialogue pointers.

Get the hang of great dialogue

Learn how to write dialogue in a structured, four-week self-study course.

2. Cut filler

In strong dialogue, there is no filler . If characters speak on the phone, there are no ‘may I speak to’s’ or ‘Please hold’s’. Cut all filler from your dialogue. Launch straight into any phone conversation. For example:

“Yes?”

The voice on the other end of the line was doubtful; suspicious.

Sometimes, filler material such as an introduction between characters , is necessary. Yet take the opportunity to weave in colourful character description .  For example, here is an introduction in Charles Dickens’  Great Expectations that is full of character:

‘…Joe was smoking his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle and a stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with “Halloa, Pip, old chap!” and the moment he said that, the stranger turned his head and looked at me.

He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head was all on one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he were taking aim at something with an invisible gun.’

Note that Joe’s greeting is just four words. Yet Dickens instead adds narration around Joe’s voice, giving detailed character description.

‘Filler’ includes unnecessary dialogue tags. Instead of an endless ‘he said, she said’, see where you can replace a tag with a gesture or motion that supplies more story information. Compare:

“So you’re leaving…” he said.

“I thought that much was obvious,” she said.

The dialogue tags have a monotonous, repetitive effect. You could either leave them out entirely (if the preceding scene’s  context  makes it clear who says which line), or you could add gesture that attributes the dialogue the same:

“So you’re leaving…” He folds his arms, standing in the doorway.

“I thought that much was obvious.” Pausing her packing, she looks over her shoulder at him, resisting the sudden impulse to turn and face him.

Here the dialogue supplies a lot more detail about the emotions of the scene, while avoiding clunky repetition of a standard dialogue writing device.

Another type of filler in dialogue is excessive adverbs. Let the words themselves convey tone and mood:

3. Include conflict and disagreement

Key to writing great dialogue is knowing how to write dialogue involving confrontation or disagreement . In real life, we might go weeks without a single terse or grumpy word to another person. Yet in stories, conflict and confrontation in dialogue supply narrative tension and this keeps the story compelling.

If everyone in your novel gets on swimmingly with everyone else, this could result in dull dialogue.

For example, the verbal sparring between Estella and Pip in  Great Expectations  creates tension, as we see Estella taunt and test Pip by insulting and goading him. Her dialogue and behaviour is consistent with Estella’s backstory. Her legal guardian, Miss Havisham, once jilted by a lover, has turned the young Estella against boys and sentimentality:

“Well?” “Well, miss?” I answered, almost falling over her and checking myself. “Am I pretty?” “Yes; I think you are very pretty.” “Am I insulting?” “Not so much so as you were last time,” said I. “Not so much so?” “No.” She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face with such force as she had, when I answered it. “Now?” said she. “You little coarse monster, what do you think of me now?” “I shall not tell you.”

Conflict and disagreement might not be anything so dramatic as a physical altercation mid-dialogue. It could be something as small as two traveling characters arguing over a map in the middle of a maze-like city. But these moments of tension are useful for illustrating how your characters react (and interact) under pressure.

4. Involve characters’ goals, fears and desires

Remember that characters don’t always need to be honest, willing or helpful conversation partners.  They may be cryptic and misguiding. They can trip each other up with questions and evasive responses. This is particularly the case in dialogue where characters hold different levels of power (in an interrogation or courtroom cross-examination, for example).

Like an unreliable narrator, an unreliable character in conversation could feed your protagonist false information, out of their own motivation.

In every dialogue, keep in mind what motivates each character.

Before you start writing an important section of dialogue, ask yourself:

• What does each character want at this point in the story? What do they fear?
• How might each character’s goals, fears and desires shift or affect this particular conversation?

When you connect character’s conversations to their personal paths and goals in your story, even if just subconsciously, this will help you write more directed, purposeful-seeming dialogue. This is particularly important in genres such as crime and mystery, where characters gaining information from others forms a big part of the narrative.

This leads into subtext in dialogue:

5: Include subtext for subtle gestures and effects

Subtext  in dialogue is as important as  context . It’s the ‘why’ (in addition to the where ) underlying characters’ conversations. If, for example, a spouse suspects their partner of cheating, this underlying mistrust could be the subtext for an unrelated conversation about dinner plans with their friends. The  subtext  explains the turn the conversation takes:

“The Watsons have invited us for dinner this Saturday.” She beamed.

“What, again? That’s the third time this month. You seem thrilled. Next they’ll be inviting you to a menage a trois.”

She didn’t understand why he brought every conversation to sex lately. It seemed a new infatuation. And why did he always state the obvious about her every mood and gesture?

Here, the subtext of suspicion and mistrust makes the dialogue interesting. A mundane conversation about dinner plans becomes a story in miniature about jealousy and miscommunication.

6. Involve context for tone and atmosphere

The  context  in dialogue (another subject we explore in  How to Write Dialogue)  is important. The context of a conversation – the place where the conversation occurs, and the circumstances leading to it – gives us important details. Mastering using context in dialogue is important because it will help you avoid using adverbs with dialogue tags that make the author’s shaping hand too visible. For example:

“I think someone might be in the house,” she said softly.

Here, you could use the stronger tag ‘she whispered’ to convey volume and eliminate the unnecessary adverb. Yet you could also use context from setting and narration to convey the  softness  of the conversation here:

For weeks they’d been tempted to enter the dilapidated house. It was a late, windy Friday afternoon when temptation got the better of them. They’d knocked nervously first, not knowing what they’d do if someone answered. After a hushed minute, they’d crept and tip-toed inside, while the paint-stripped front door creaked closed. They were huddling together and shuffling down a dark, musty corridor when she heard a sudden noise from upstairs. “I think someone might be in the house…” Her eyes were wide, her voice barely audible.

Here you don’t need an adverb – the context supplies plenty of detail to suggest the character’s fear and the house’s eerie stillness.

When thinking about the context of characters’ conversation, remember Toni Morrison’s dialogue writing advice:

“I never say ‘She says softly’ […] If it’s not already soft, you know, I have to leave a lot of space around it so a reader can hear that it’s soft.’

7. Learn by copying out great dialogue

Many great artists in all mediums – art, literature, music – have learned and honed their craft by copying out effective work by their peers and predecessors. To write great dialogue, write down a few lines of dialogue in a journal when you come across dialogue in a story that makes you say ‘wow!’

Create your own treasure trove of inspiring dialogue snippets that you can dip into whenever you need a reminder of how to write dialogue that builds character and story.

Want helpful feedback on sections of your dialogue? Enroll in our four-week course  How to Write Dialogue  and get an editor’s feedback.

I took the course “How to Write Dialogue” offered by Now Novel. The learning material is well-structured and easy to comprehend. The clear and elegant style of the workbooks made me enjoy the learning process. Creative assignments inspired me to complete each of them. Lastly, the course instructors reviewed the final writing assignment and provided with feedback. I am grateful to receive advice on areas of improvement. I recommend this course for each writer who wants to build a good foundation in writing dialogues. — Tanya

Related Posts:

• How to write a great short story: 7 simple steps
• How to write a short story: 10 steps to a great read
• Great dialogue: 10 tips from movie dialogue pros
• Tags dialogue , how to format dialogue

Jordan is a writer, editor, community manager and product developer. He received his BA Honours in English Literature and his undergraduate in English Literature and Music from the University of Cape Town.

4 replies on “How to write dialogue: 7 steps for great conversation”

Great tips, thanks!

It’s a pleasure, Charlotte. Thanks for reading!

Gud one …actually awesome

Found perfection place

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Last updated on Jul 24, 2023

15 Examples of Great Dialogue (And Why They Work So Well)

Great dialogue is hard to pin down, but you know it when you hear or see it. In the earlier parts of this guide, we showed you some well-known tips and rules for writing dialogue. In this section, we'll show you those rules in action with 15 examples of great dialogue, breaking down exactly why they work so well.

1. Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered 

In the opening of Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, we meet Willa Knox, a middle-aged and newly unemployed writer who has just inherited a ramshackle house. 

     “The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” the man said. “The house is a shambles.”      She took this news as a blood-rush to the ears: a roar of peasant ancestors with rocks in their fists, facing the evictor. But this man was a contractor. Willa had called him here and she could send him away. She waited out her panic while he stood looking at her shambles, appearing to nurse some satisfaction from his diagnosis. She picked out words.      “It’s not a living thing. You can’t just pronounce it dead. Anything that goes wrong with a structure can be replaced with another structure. Am I right?”      “Correct. What I am saying is that the structure needing to be replaced is all of it. I’m sorry. Your foundation is nonexistent.”

Alfred Hitchcock once described drama as "life with the boring bits cut out." In this passage, Kingsolver cuts out the boring parts of Willa's conversation with her contractor and brings us right to the tensest, most interesting part of the conversation.

By entering their conversation late , the reader is spared every tedious detail of their interaction.

Instead of a blow-by-blow account of their negotiations (what she needs done, when he’s free, how she’ll be paying), we’re dropped right into the emotional heart of the discussion. The novel opens with the narrator learning that the home she cherishes can’t be salvaged. 

By starting off in the middle of (relatively obscure) dialogue, it takes a moment for the reader to orient themselves in the story and figure out who is speaking, and what they’re speaking about. This disorientation almost mirrors Willa’s own reaction to the bad news, as her expectations for a new life in her new home are swiftly undermined.

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2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice  

In the first piece of dialogue in Pride and Prejudice , we meet Mr and Mrs Bennet, as Mrs Bennet attempts to draw her husband into a conversation about neighborhood gossip.

     “My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”      Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.      “But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.”      Mr. Bennet made no answer.      “Do you not want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.      “You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”      This was invitation enough.      “Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it, that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.”

Austen’s dialogue is always witty, subtle, and packed with character. This extract from Pride and Prejudice is a great example of dialogue being used to develop character relationships . 

We instantly learn everything we need to know about the dynamic between Mr and Mrs Bennet’s from their first interaction: she’s chatty, and he’s the beleaguered listener who has learned to entertain her idle gossip, if only for his own sake (hence “you want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it”).

There is even a clear difference between the two characters visually on the page: Mr Bennet responds in short sentences, in simple indirect speech, or not at all, but this is “invitation enough” for Mrs Bennet to launch into a rambling and extended response, dominating the conversation in text just as she does audibly.

The fact that Austen manages to imbue her dialogue with so much character-building realism means we hardly notice the amount of crucial plot exposition she has packed in here. This heavily expository dialogue could be a drag to get through, but Austen’s colorful characterization means she slips it under the radar with ease, forwarding both our understanding of these people and the world they live in simultaneously.

3. Naomi Alderman, The Power

In The Power , young women around the world suddenly find themselves capable of generating and controlling electricity. In this passage, between two boys and a girl who just used those powers to light her cigarette.

     Kyle gestures with his chin and says, “Heard a bunch of guys killed a girl in Nebraska last week for doing that.”      “For smoking? Harsh.”      Hunter says, “Half the kids in school know you can do it.”      “So what?”      Hunter says, “Your dad could use you in his factory. Save money on electricity.”      “He’s not my dad.”      She makes the silver flicker at the ends of her fingers again. The boys watch.

Alderman here uses a show, don’t tell approach to expositional dialogue. Within this short exchange, we discover a lot about Allie, her personal circumstances, and the developing situation elsewhere. We learn that women are being punished harshly for their powers; that Allie is expected to be ashamed of those powers and keep them a secret, but doesn’t seem to care to do so; that her father is successful in industry; and that she has a difficult relationship with him. Using dialogue in this way prevents info-dumping backstory all at once, and instead helps us learn about the novel’s world in a natural way.

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4. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Here, friends Tommy and Kathy have a conversation after Tommy has had a meltdown. After being bullied by a group of boys, he has been stomping around in the mud, the precise reaction they were hoping to evoke from him.

     “Tommy,” I said, quite sternly. “There’s mud all over your shirt.”      “So what?” he mumbled. But even as he said this, he looked down and noticed the brown specks, and only just stopped himself crying out in alarm. Then I saw the surprise register on his face that I should know about his feelings for the polo shirt.      “It’s nothing to worry about.” I said, before the silence got humiliating for him. “It’ll come off. If you can’t get it off yourself, just take it to Miss Jody.”      He went on examining his shirt, then said grumpily, “It’s nothing to do with you anyway.”

This episode from Never Let Me Go highlights the power of interspersing action beats within dialogue. These action beats work in several ways to add depth to what would otherwise be a very simple and fairly nondescript exchange.  Firstly, they draw attention to the polo shirt, and highlight its potential significance in the plot. Secondly, they help to further define Kathy’s relationship with Tommy. 

We learn through Tommy’s surprised reaction that he didn’t think Kathy knew how much he loved his seemingly generic polo shirt. This moment of recognition allows us to see that she cares for him and understands him more deeply than even he realized. Kathy breaking the silence before it can “humiliate” Tommy further emphasizes her consideration for him. While the dialogue alone might make us think Kathy is downplaying his concerns with pragmatic advice, it is the action beats that tell the true story here.

5. J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit  

The eponymous hobbit Bilbo is engaged in a game of riddles with the strange creature Gollum.

     "What have I got in my pocket?" he said aloud. He was talking to himself, but Gollum thought it was a riddle, and he was frightfully upset.       "Not fair! not fair!" he hissed. "It isn't fair, my precious, is it, to ask us what it's got in its nassty little pocketses?"      Bilbo seeing what had happened and having nothing better to ask stuck to his question. "What have I got in my pocket?" he said louder. "S-s-s-s-s," hissed Gollum. "It must give us three guesseses, my precious, three guesseses."      "Very well! Guess away!" said Bilbo.      "Handses!" said Gollum.      "Wrong," said Bilbo, who had luckily just taken his hand out again. "Guess again!"      "S-s-s-s-s," said Gollum, more upset than ever. 

Tolkein’s dialogue for Gollum is a masterclass in creating distinct character voices . By using a repeated catchphrase (“my precious”) and unconventional spelling and grammar to reflect his unusual speech pattern, Tolkien creates an idiosyncratic, unique (and iconic) speech for Gollum. This vivid approach to formatting dialogue, which is almost a transliteration of Gollum's sounds, allows readers to imagine his speech pattern and practically hear it aloud.

We wouldn’t recommend using this extreme level of idiosyncrasy too often in your writing — it can get wearing for readers after a while, and Tolkien deploys it sparingly, as Gollum’s appearances are limited to a handful of scenes. However, you can use Tolkien’s approach as inspiration to create (slightly more subtle) quirks of speech for your own characters.

6. F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The narrator, Nick has just done his new neighbour Gatsby a favor by inviting his beloved Daisy over to tea. Perhaps in return, Gatsby then attempts to make a shady business proposition.

     “There’s another little thing,” he said uncertainly, and hesitated.      “Would you rather put it off for a few days?” I asked.      “Oh, it isn’t about that. At least —” He fumbled with a series of beginnings. “Why, I thought — why, look here, old sport, you don’t make much money, do you?”      “Not very much.”      This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.       “I thought you didn’t, if you’ll pardon my — you see, I carry on a little business on the side, a little side line, if you understand. And I thought that if you don’t make very much — You’re selling bonds, aren’t you, old sport?”      “Trying to.” 

This dialogue from The Great Gatsby is a great example of how to make dialogue sound natural. Gatsby tripping over his own words (even interrupting himself , as marked by the em-dashes) not only makes his nerves and awkwardness palpable but also mimics real speech. Just as real people often falter and make false starts when they’re speaking off the cuff, Gatsby too flounders, giving us insight into his self-doubt; his speech isn’t polished and perfect, and neither is he despite all his efforts to appear so.

Fitzgerald also creates a distinctive voice for Gatsby by littering his speech with the character's signature term of endearment, “old sport”. We don’t even really need dialogue markers to know who’s speaking here — a sign of very strong characterization through dialogue.

7. Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet  

In this first meeting between the two heroes of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, John is introduced to Sherlock while the latter is hard at work in the lab.

      “How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”      “How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.      “Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself. “The question now is about hemoglobin. No doubt you see the significance of this discovery of mine?”     “It is interesting, chemically, no doubt,” I answered, “but practically— ”      “Why, man, it is the most practical medico-legal discovery for years. Don’t you see that it gives us an infallible test for blood stains. Come over here now!” He seized me by the coat-sleeve in his eagerness, and drew me over to the table at which he had been working. “Let us have some fresh blood,” he said, digging a long bodkin into his finger, and drawing off the resulting drop of blood in a chemical pipette. “Now, I add this small quantity of blood to a litre of water. You perceive that the resulting mixture has the appearance of pure water. The proportion of blood cannot be more than one in a million. I have no doubt, however, that we shall be able to obtain the characteristic reaction.” As he spoke, he threw into the vessel a few white crystals, and then added some drops of a transparent fluid. In an instant the contents assumed a dull mahogany colour, and a brownish dust was precipitated to the bottom of the glass jar.      “Ha! ha!” he cried, clapping his hands, and looking as delighted as a child with a new toy. “What do you think of that?”

This passage uses a number of the key techniques for writing naturalistic and exciting dialogue, including characters speaking over one another and the interspersal of action beats. 

Sherlock cutting off Watson to launch into a monologue about his blood experiment shows immediately where Sherlock’s interest lies — not in small talk, or the person he is speaking to, but in his own pursuits, just like earlier in the conversation when he refuses to explain anything to John and is instead self-absorbedly “chuckling to himself”. This helps establish their initial rapport (or lack thereof) very quickly.

Breaking up that monologue with snippets of him undertaking the forensic tests allows us to experience the full force of his enthusiasm over it without having to read an uninterrupted speech about the ins and outs of a science experiment.

Starting to think you might like to read some Sherlock? Check out our guide to the Sherlock Holmes canon !

8. Brandon Taylor, Real Life

Here, our protagonist Wallace is questioned by Ramon, a friend-of-a-friend, over the fact that he is considering leaving his PhD program.

     Wallace hums. “I mean, I wouldn’t say that I want to leave, but I’ve thought about it, sure.”     “Why would you do that? I mean, the prospects for… black people, you know?”        “What are the prospects for black people?” Wallace asks, though he knows he will be considered the aggressor for this question.

Brandon Taylor’s Real Life is drawn from the author’s own experiences as a queer Black man, attempting to navigate the unwelcoming world of academia, navigating the world of academia, and so it’s no surprise that his dialogue rings so true to life — it’s one of the reasons the novel is one of our picks for must-read books by Black authors . 

This episode is part of a pattern where Wallace is casually cornered and questioned by people who never question for a moment whether they have the right to ambush him or criticize his choices. The use of indirect dialogue at the end shows us this is a well-trodden path for Wallace: he has had this same conversation several times, and can pre-empt the exact outcome.

This scene is also a great example of the dramatic significance of people choosing not to speak. The exchange happens in front of a big group, but — despite their apparent discomfort —  nobody speaks up to defend Wallace, or to criticize Ramon’s patronizing microaggressions. Their silence is deafening, and we get a glimpse of Ramon’s isolation due to the complacency of others, all due to what is not said in this dialogue example.

9. Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants

In this short story, an unnamed man and a young woman discuss whether or not they should terminate a pregnancy while sitting on a train platform.

     “Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.”      “And you really want to?”      “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you really don’t want to.”      “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?”      “I love you now. You know I love you.”      “I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?”      “I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.”      “If I do it you won’t ever worry?”      “I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.”

This example of dialogue from Hemingway’s short story Hills Like White Elephants moves at quite a clip. The conversation quickly bounces back and forth between the speakers, and the call-and-response format of the woman asking and the man answering is effective because it establishes a clear dynamic between the two speakers: the woman is the one seeking reassurance and trying to understand the man’s feelings, while he is the one who is ultimately in control of the situation.

Note the sparing use of dialogue markers: this minimalist approach keeps the dialogue brisk, and we can still easily understand who is who due to the use of a new paragraph when the speaker changes .

Like this classic author’s style? Head over to our selection of the 11 best Ernest Hemingway books .

10. Madeline Miller, Circe

In Madeline Miller’s retelling of Greek myth, we witness a conversation between the mythical enchantress Circe and Telemachus (son of Odysseus).

     “You do not grieve for your father?”        “I do. I grieve that I never met the father everyone told me I had.”           I narrowed my eyes. “Explain.”      “I am no storyteller.”      “I am not asking for a story. You have come to my island. You owe me truth.”       A moment passed, and then he nodded. “You will have it.” 

This short and punchy exchange hits on a lot of the stylistic points we’ve covered so far. The conversation is a taut tennis match between the two speakers as they volley back and forth with short but impactful sentences, and unnecessary dialogue tags have been shaved off . It also highlights Circe’s imperious attitude, a result of her divine status. Her use of short, snappy declaratives and imperatives demonstrates that she’s used to getting her own way and feels no need to mince her words.

11. Andre Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

This is an early conversation between seventeen-year-old Elio and his family’s handsome new student lodger, Oliver.

     What did one do around here? Nothing. Wait for summer to end. What did one do in the winter, then?      I smiled at the answer I was about to give. He got the gist and said, “Don’t tell me: wait for summer to come, right?”      I liked having my mind read. He’d pick up on dinner drudgery sooner than those before him.      “Actually, in the winter the place gets very gray and dark. We come for Christmas. Otherwise it’s a ghost town.”      “And what else do you do here at Christmas besides roast chestnuts and drink eggnog?”      He was teasing. I offered the same smile as before. He understood, said nothing, we laughed.      He asked what I did. I played tennis. Swam. Went out at night. Jogged. Transcribed music. Read.      He said he jogged too. Early in the morning. Where did one jog around here? Along the promenade, mostly. I could show him if he wanted.      It hit me in the face just when I was starting to like him again: “Later, maybe.”

Dialogue is one of the most crucial aspects of writing romance — what’s a literary relationship without some flirty lines? Here, however, Aciman gives us a great example of efficient dialogue. By removing unnecessary dialogue and instead summarizing with narration, he’s able to confer the gist of the conversation without slowing down the pace unnecessarily. Instead, the emphasis is left on what’s unsaid, the developing romantic subtext. 

Furthermore, the fact that we receive this scene in half-reported snippets rather than as an uninterrupted transcript emphasizes the fact that this is Elio’s own recollection of the story, as the manipulation of the dialogue in this way serves to mimic the nostalgic haziness of memory.

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12. George Eliot, Middlemarch

Two of Eliot’s characters, Mary and Rosamond, are out shopping,

     When she and Rosamond happened both to be reflected in the glass, she said laughingly —      “What a brown patch I am by the side of you, Rosy! You are the most unbecoming companion.”      “Oh no! No one thinks of your appearance, you are so sensible and useful, Mary. Beauty is of very little consequence in reality,” said Rosamond, turning her head towards Mary, but with eyes swerving towards the new view of her neck in the glass.      “You mean my beauty,” said Mary, rather sardonically.       Rosamond thought, “Poor Mary, she takes the kindest things ill.” Aloud she said, “What have you been doing lately?”      “I? Oh, minding the house — pouring out syrup — pretending to be amiable and contented — learning to have a bad opinion of everybody.”

This excerpt, a conversation between the level-headed Mary and vain Rosamond, is an example of dialogue that develops character relationships naturally. Action descriptors allow us to understand what is really happening in the conversation. 

Whilst the speech alone might lead us to believe Rosamond is honestly (if clumsily) engaging with her friend, the description of her simultaneously gazing at herself in a mirror gives us insight not only into her vanity, but also into the fact that she is not really engaged in her conversation with Mary at all.

The use of internal dialogue cut into the conversation (here formatted with quotation marks rather than the usual italics ) lets us know what Rosamond is actually thinking, and the contrast between this and what she says aloud is telling. The fact that we know she privately realizes she has offended Mary, but quickly continues the conversation rather than apologizing, is emphatic of her character. We get to know Rosamond very well within this short passage, which is a hallmark of effective character-driven dialogue.

13. John Steinbeck, The Winter of our Discontent

Here, Mary (speaking first) reacts to her husband Ethan’s attempts to discuss his previous experiences as a disciplined soldier, his struggles in subsequent life, and his feeling of impending change.

     “You’re trying to tell me something.”      “Sadly enough, I am. And it sounds in my ears like an apology. I hope it is not.”      “I’m going to set out lunch.”

Steinbeck’s Winter of our Discontent is an acute study of alienation and miscommunication, and this exchange exemplifies the ways in which characters can fail to communicate, even when they’re speaking. The pair speaking here are trapped in a dysfunctional marriage which leaves Ethan feeling isolated, and part of his loneliness comes from the accumulation of exchanges such as this one. Whenever he tries to communicate meaningfully with his wife, she shuts the conversation down with a complete non sequitur. 

We expect Mary’s “you’re trying to tell me something” to be followed by a revelation, but Ethan is not forthcoming in his response, and Mary then exits the conversation entirely. Nothing is communicated, and the jarring and frustrating effect of having our expectations subverted goes a long way in mirroring Ethan’s own frustration.

Just like Ethan and Mary, we receive no emotional pay-off, and this passage of characters talking past one another doesn’t further the plot as we hope it might, but instead gives us insight into the extent of these characters’ estrangement.

14. Bret Easton Ellis , Less Than Zero

The disillusioned main character of Bret Easton Ellis’ debut novel, Clay, here catches up with a college friend, Daniel, whom he hasn’t seen in a while. 

     He keeps rubbing his mouth and when I realize that he’s not going to answer me, I ask him what he’s been doing.      “Been doing?”      “Yeah.”      “Hanging out.”      “Hanging out where?”      “Where? Around.”

Less Than Zero is an elegy to conversation, and this dialogue is an example of the many vacuous exchanges the protagonist engages in, seemingly just to fill time. The whole book is deliberately unpoetic and flat, and depicts the lives of disaffected youths in 1980s LA. Their misguided attempts to fill the emptiness within them with drink and drugs are ultimately fruitless, and it shows in their conversations: in truth, they have nothing to say to one another at all.

This utterly meaningless exchange would elsewhere be considered dead weight to a story. Here, rather than being fat in need of trimming, the empty conversation is instead thematically resonant.

15. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

The young narrator of du Maurier’s classic gothic novel here has a strained conversation with Robert, one of the young staff members at her new husband’s home, the unwelcoming Manderley.

     “Has Mr. de Winter been in?” I said.      “Yes, Madam,” said Robert; “he came in just after two, and had a quick lunch, and then went out again. He asked for you and Frith said he thought you must have gone down to see the ship.”      “Did he say when he would be back again?” I asked.      “No, Madam.”      “Perhaps he went to the beach another way,” I said; “I may have missed him.”      “Yes, Madam,” said Robert.      I looked at the cold meat and the salad. I felt empty but not hungry. I did not want cold meat now. “Will you be taking lunch?” said Robert.      “No,” I said, “No, you might bring me some tea, Robert, in the library. Nothing like cakes or scones. Just tea and bread and butter.”      “Yes, Madam.”

We’re including this one in our dialogue examples list to show you the power of everything Du Maurier doesn’t do: rather than cycling through a ton of fancy synonyms for “said”, she opts for spare dialogue and tags. 

This interaction's cold, sparse tone complements the lack of warmth the protagonist feels in the moment depicted here. By keeping the dialogue tags simple , the author ratchets up the tension —  without any distracting flourishes taking the reader out of the scene. The subtext of the conversation is able to simmer under the surface, and we aren’t beaten over the head with any stage direction extras.

The inclusion of three sentences of internal dialogue in the middle of the dialogue (“I looked at the cold meat and the salad. I felt empty but not hungry. I did not want cold meat now.”) is also a masterful touch. What could have been a single sentence is stretched into three, creating a massive pregnant pause before Robert continues speaking, without having to explicitly signpost one. Manipulating the pace of dialogue in this way and manufacturing meaningful silence is a great way of adding depth to a scene.

Phew! We've been through a lot of dialogue, from first meetings to idle chit-chat to confrontations, and we hope these dialogue examples have been helpful in illustrating some of the most common techniques.

If you’re looking for more pointers on creating believable and effective dialogue, be sure to check out our course on writing dialogue. Or, if you find you learn better through examples, you can look at our list of 100 books to read before you die — it’s packed full of expert storytellers who’ve honed the art of dialogue.

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How to Write Effective Dialogue, with Examples

by Chris Snellgrove

Good dialogue can help elevate your story while making your characters seem realistic and relatable. Bad dialogue, though, can turn even the coolest literary concept into a poorly executed mess.

To help you better understand how to write dialogue in your story, let’s take a look at why it’s important and how you can make your story’s dialogue really shine.

Why is effective dialogue important?

Effective dialogue is important because it brings your characters to life, helps readers relate to the character, and helps to move the story along.

On the most basic level, dialogue is what animates your characters. Just think: without dialogue—the kind between two characters who speak to each other, as well as the “dialogue” of body language—your characters would just be random people undertaking a series of different actions.

Realistic dialogue is also how readers relate to and understand character dynamics—dialogue give characters depth. Has a character suffered some kind of defining trauma? Or do they have a special code of honor that dictates their behavior? Revealing these things through a few lines of dialogue rather than exposition helps your story live up to the old chestnut: show, don’t tell!

Good dialogue serves other story functions as well: It helps to break up action and exposition, giving your story time to breathe; it’s the primary way to add emotion to a scene; and dialogue helps to establish character relationships. Are these two characters secretly in love, or maybe they openly hate each other? Or both ?? Good dialogue helps reveal who these characters are as well as their primary motivations.

Dialogue helps break up the action

A key factor in any story is pacing. If the characters do little else but talk to each other, then your story can come across as boring instead of engaging.

However, it’s possible to have too much action and too little dialogue. Readers love it when a story moves quickly, but maintaining a constant breakneck pace can leave readers exhausted. You can use dialogue tags to identify speakers as well as speed up or slow down moments of a story.

By having your characters speak to one another between and even during action, you can maintain upbeat pacing without tiring your readers out.

Dialogue helps establish character relationships

One of the biggest challenges for any writer is creating convincing relationships between characters—and better dialogue is the single best way to do that!

For example, when readers see one character speak lightly and casually to one person, and gruffly angrily to another, they instantly understand from a line of dialogue how the one character feels about the two others. In turn, the speech patterns and inflections that respond to the first character’s dialogue let readers see whether these relationships (friendly in one case and antagonistic in the other) are one-sided or mutual.

Dialogue creates relatable characters

Something beginning writers often struggle with is that description can only tell us what a character is. It’s only through writing great dialogue that the writer tells us who a character is.

That’s because readers relate to characters based on their personalities, and personalities are most apparent in characters’ voices, or the way the dialogue sounds. One reader may love sarcastic characters and another may love noble characters, but these readers won’t really understand the character personalities until those characters are speaking to one another.

Think about some of your favourite moments throughout literary and film history. These lines of dialogue define the person speaking and help define how we relate to the characters. A relatable character without realistic dialogue is, simply put, not relatable at all!

How story dialogue differs from real-life dialogue

Story dialogue differs from dialogue you might hear in your own life because characters in a story typically skip small talk, avoid speaking over one another, and have a clear motivation for everything they say, whereas dialogue in real life is filled with polite chatter, crosstalk, and completely random points of conversation.

The earliest advice most writers get is “write what you know.” This may explain why learning to write dialogue is so difficult: we naturally learn how to speak to others, but we don’t naturally learn how characters should communicate in a well-crafted story.

A line of dialogue should always help to move a story forward. In real life, two people who know each other might engage in half an hour of small talk before getting down to business. But in a story, your characters should skip things like greetings and small talk and get down to business right away.

In real life, characters talk over each other constantly. But that would create chaos in a book or short story. Instead, characters should mostly speak one at a time. If you rarely have characters speaking over one another, then it’ll have more impact on your readers when it does happen.

Finally, in real life, we don’t actually know the motivations of different people. It’s why we so often ask ourselves “why the heck did he say that?” after a weird conversation with a real-life person. But within the confines of your story, you should know what motivates every single character. This can help you craft dialogue that fleshes those characters out and moves the story along without breaking the readers’ internal understanding of the characters. That way, your readers will never wonder why a character uttered a specific bit of dialogue.

Examples of great dialogue

To really understand great dialogue, you must do more than learn about different writing techniques. Instead, you must study great dialogue directly. As T. S. Eliot famously wrote, “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ Let us go and make our visit.”

Many examples of amazing dialogue and dialogue tags can be found in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby . Let’s take a closer look at this scene, in which Gatsby tries to invite the naive Nick into a less-than-savory business.

“There’s another little thing,” he said uncertainly, and hesitated. “Would you rather put it off for a few days?” I asked. “Oh, it isn’t about that. At least—” He fumbled with a series of beginnings. “Why, I thought why, look here, old sport, you don’t make much money, do you?” “Not very much.” This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently. “I thought you didn’t, if you’ll pardon my—you see, I carry on a little business on the side, a little side line, if you understand. And I thought that if you don’t make very much—You’re selling bonds, aren’t you, old sport?” “Trying to.”

Imagine that you’ve never read The Great Gatsby before. What does this dialogue exchange tell you about the characters?

We instantly see that Gatsby is uncertain about various things despite his material success. Though this dialogue doesn’t spell out the unsavory nature of Gatsby’s business, the circumspect way he brings it up shows that he seems to be ashamed of it.

Nick, for his part, comes across as both conscientious and easy to please. Finally, the dialogue includes character markers (like Gatsby calling others “old sport”) so that we never lose track of who’s talking, even as Gatsby manages to interrupt himself.

Part of what makes Fitzgerald such a skilled writer is that he threads the needle between realistic writing and literary writing. Gatsby’s fumbling dialogue is realistic because everyone knows what it’s like to get nervous and trip over our own words. At the same time, Fitzgerald keeps the dialogue short and to the point, which moves the plot along.

Another great inspiration for dialogue is Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s a master of sparse dialogue. As you’ll see, Heh keeps dialogue tags and lets the words speak for themselves. While your dialogue doesn’t have to be as sparse as Hemingway’s was, the famous author shows us how much you can say without saying much. This is especially true in this passage from his short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which a man and a woman discuss whether the woman should abort their baby:

“Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.” “And you really want to?” “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you really don’t want to.” “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?” “I love you now. You know I love you.” “I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?” “I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.” “If I do it you won’t ever worry?” “I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.”

What does this passage reveal about these characters? For one thing, despite the male character’s reassurances that he cares about what the woman wants, it’s perfectly clear that he maintains control within the relationship. It’s equally clear that she’s emotionally dependent on the man, relying on him for reassurance about their love and their relationship.

The dialogue also reveals dark and tragic overtones. For example, we as readers understand how traumatic an abortion can be on the woman, so the man’s frequent insistence that it’s “perfectly simple” reveals that he may not care much about her thoughts and feelings.

Meanwhile, the woman has realized their love isn’t as idyllic as she once imagined, but is convinced that an abortion can return things to the way they are. As readers, we can imagine how depressing the status quo of this codependent relationship is, while immediately understanding that things will probably never be the same for these characters again. This is why good dialogue is such a useful tool in character development.

Examples of bad dialogue

As writers, it’s often easier to learn from our own mistakes rather than our successes. When it comes to writing better dialogue, it’s surprisingly easy to learn how to write dialogue by studying the mistakes of others!

Let’s take a look at examples of bad dialogue from famous authors and what we can learn from these mistakes. We’ll start with an excerpt from Frank Herbert’s Dune :

A chuckle sounded beside the globe. A basso voice rumbled out of the chuckle: “There it is, Piter—the biggest mantrap in all history. And the Duke’s headed into its jaws. Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?’

Dune may be one the most influential books ever written, but this bit of dialogue is one clunker after another. The fact that Harkonnen drops his own name like this is cringe-inducing; since the reader already knows who he is, this information is redundant. Nobody actually talks like that, so Harkonnen’s dialogue makes him come across like a reject from a bad B-movie.

Additionally, Herbert is violating the “show, don’t tell” rule. It’s much more effective when readers can gauge the danger in a situation themselves based on description and well-written dialogue. Instead, here we must either dismiss the claim of “the biggest mantrap in all history” as hyperbole because we can’t actually gauge the magnitude of the threat for ourselves, or just take this repetitive villain at his word.

Another major dialogue offender in the world of science fiction is Neal Stephenson. His novel Snow Crash helped to predict our modern digital world, but it didn’t always reflect how people actually talk. Just look at this excerpt:

“‘Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people’s minds.” ”So none of that stuff I learned in church has anything to do with what you’re talking about?” Juanita thinks for a while, eyeing him. Then she pulls a hypercard out of her pocket. “Here. Take this.”

What’s so bad about this dialogue? For one thing, it’s didactic in a very off-putting way. As readers, we can practically feel Stephenson grabbing us by our lapels to yell at us about religion.

This is underscored by the fact that the character speaking doesn’t really answer the question. We can see that the rant about faith, religion, and intelligence isn’t important, and it’s not going to move the plot forward.

Finally, this dialogue “exchange” is a great example of characters talking at each other rather than to each other. It’s tough to imagine anyone just sitting there while Juanita blithely says that everyone of faith is an idiot. In a science fiction story meant to be very immersive, stilted and didactic dialogue quickly takes the reader out of the moment and out of the narrative.

Writing internal dialogue

There are two basic styles of writing internal dialogue: indirect internal dialogue, which doesn’t directly draw the reader’s attention, and direct internal dialogue, which is marked with special dialogue tags.

Indirect internal dialogue is what readers are most familiar with. In this case, “indirect” simply means you don’t draw attention to the dialogue through italics or a dialogue tag. Instead, you simply write out what the character is thinking to themselves as a description, the same way that you’d write out what they’re doing. For example:

Tommy peered through the abandoned room with his flashlight, the electricity having long since been turned off. He couldn’t help but feel like the last ghost haunting the abandoned building long after the other spirits had moved on.

See how we’re privy to his internal thoughts, which are told to the reader as part of the narrative?

On the other hand, with direct internal dialogue you highlight internal thoughts in a way that’s distinct from spoken dialogue. The most common way to do this is to place the internal thoughts in italics. For example:

This is crazy , Tommy thought, shining his flashlight over the darkened room. What did I ever expect to find in here ? Wind howling through a broken window was the only answer to his thoughts.

Here the thoughts are set apart from the narrative by a dialogue tag, “Tommy thought.”

Which method of expressing internal dialogue you use mostly comes down to your own personal style. Just keep in mind that readers place special attention to text that has been italicized. So if you put internal dialogue in italics, make sure it counts!

Writing first-person dialogue

Writing in first person PoV is fairly easy: you simply use first-person pronouns to create statements about what your character has seen and said. Then why do some writers struggle with learning to write dialogue in the first person?

Firstly, some writers struggle with incorporating their character’s feelings and emotions into first-person dialogue. Without dialogue that conveys emotion, the first-person narrator may come across as a floating camera simply recording events rather than a real person having real thoughts and feelings about different events.

Secondly, it’s easy to accidentally slip into the passive voice. As with any other kind of writing, first-person dialogue should remain in the active voice to keep the reader engaged.

Finally, it’s easy to be annoyingly repetitive, like including countless instances of “I said” and “I felt.” To really make first-person dialogue work, you’ll need to change things up to keep the narrative exciting.

How, then, can we avoid these mistakes and craft better first-person dialogue?

When you’re writing first-person internal dialogue, make sure that it’s consistent with the character’s previous characterization and motivation. Readers should be able to distinguish the internal voice of different characters because no two characters should have the same internal voice.

It’s also important for internal dialogue to stay in the active voice. This helps it seem more dynamic and also keeps you from bogging down your narrative with confusing passive text.

To avoid constantly writing “I said” and “I felt,” you’ll need to convey to the reader how characters feel by expressing it in the dialogue. For example, if a character’s dialogue is is using angry vocabulary and expressions, then writing “I felt angry” or “I thought angrily” is unnecessary.

You can also experiment with having characters communicate using fewer words. For instance, writing “I touched the wall. Cold. Slimy. Pulsating,” communicates the same idea as saying “it felt cold, slimy, and pulsating,” but in a more concise and captivating way.

Ultimately, whether it’s said out loud or only in their heads, the real trick to character dialogue is using it to give your characters their own definitive voice.

Using dialogue to establish your protagonist’s voice

Through dialogue, you give your characters a literal voice. With the right dialogue techniques, you can give each character their own metaphorical voice that helps make each character distinct.

A metaphorical voice refers to things like a character’s inflection, speech pattern, temperament, slang, and other ways of speaking. Think about some of your favorite literary characters: chances are you have a firm idea of the kinds of things they would and wouldn’t say, and that’s because the characters’ voices are written well enough that you’ve internalized their voice.

The best way to make character’s voices unique is to make sure the character’s voices fit their personality. For example, if a character is a college professor, they’re likelier to speak in a formal way and to use precise and technical terminology. That same character’s students, however, are likelier to speak informally, using shorter sentences and less precise language.

As an added bonus, saying various characters’ dialogue in your own voice helps you workshop creative ways to avoid having too many “so-and-so said” dialogue tags . You’ll know your characters all have unique voices when reading them out loud makes your home sound like a one-person stage play!

Finally, don’t forget that how a character speaks helps flesh out their personality for readers. A character who’s always shouting, for example, will come across as nervous and excitable. A character who’s always giving advice to others will come across as wiser or maybe even as a bit of a know-it-all.

Writing dialogue between characters

Writing characters who speak to each other through effective dialogue is the key to crafting realistic stories that helps keep the plot moving. Here’s how to approach a few different common dialogue situations:

Dialogue between two characters

Remember when we said that dialogue in writing should skip the small talk? When two of your characters are talking to each other, you should have a clear idea of their individual motivations. These motivations should help propel the conversation and inform how they talk to each other, avoiding the small talk that happens in real life but that would bore a reader.

Another major factor informing character dialogue is how the characters feel about each other. If they’re joking and laughing together, we can infer they have a positive relationship. If they’re speaking formally and get right to the point, we can infer they have a more transactional relationship.

What if the characters are enemies? In that case, their exchanges might be short and tense, and the characters might be more likely to interrupt each other. Someone should be able to read the exchange without looking at the rest of your story and instantly understand that these characters don’t like each other.

Dialogue between more than two characters

Dialogue between more than two characters can become chaotic and confusing to readers. However, you can take a few easy steps to help clarify things.

For example, your initial dialogue will need to have the “X said” and “Y said” dialogue tags so the reader can keep the characters straight. But a constant onslaught of “he said” and “she said” can quickly get boring. Instead of using a new dialogue tag every time, you should sometimes have your characters address each other by name, and you should give each character a unique dialogue style that stands out on its own.

It’s also important that these scenes don’t feel like characters sitting perfectly still. Make sure the reader knows where each character is within the room and pepper the dialogue with actions the characters are taking. This further distinguishes one character from another while breaking up the dialogue and helping to move the story along.

For example:

“I can’t believe this is taking so long,” Joseph said, nervously pacing around the room. “Everyone should be here by now.”

“You really need to relax,” Morgan told him, crossing the room to pour herself a drink. “Take the edge off.”

“I’ll relax when they’re here,” Joseph pouted, plopping down into the beat-up recliner in the corner of the room.

“You’ll relax when you’re dead!” Stacy laughed as she walked into the room. “The rest of us would like to start a bit earlier.

Finally, never forget that stories are driven by conflict . By giving your characters unique motivations that sometimes oppose one another, you can create the kind of tension that really transforms a scene.

Writing overlapping dialogue

Sometimes, characters are going to talk over each other. This is likelier when more than two characters are talking. Fortunately, there are multiple ways to craft convincing overlapping dialogue.

One classic way of writing overlapping dialogue is the use of the em-dash . You can prematurely end one character’s dialogue with the dash and then have another character begin speaking. This clearly shows that the second character cut the first character off.

Billy tentatively spoke up. “Look, I’m ready to do my part, I just—” “You just what?” Sally barked. “You’re finally ready to do your part? Well, I’m ready to stop hearing excuses!”

An alternative way to express overlapping dialogue is to separate different characters’ dialogue into short phrases, with each phrase on its own line and dialogue tag. Between this formatting and the use of ellipses, you can easily show how the dialogue overlap. This technique is particularly handy for ongoing dialogue in which the characters keep cutting each other off.

Writing dialogue interruptions

Characters speaking over other characters is only one kind of dialogue interruption. But how should you write other events, including dialogue being cut off by action?

If the character is interrupting themselves, you can express this with a hyphen. If a character is interrupted by an action, we recommend ending their dialogue with an em dash and then providing a description of the action.

You may be tempted to use punctuation for an interruption followed by a comment such as “he suddenly stopped.” However, your reader will understand that an interruption has taken place. Following the em dash with a specific action is much more dynamic and helps readers learn more about your characters by seeing how they react to the interruption. For example:

“Look, you need to all pay attention. It’s very important that—”

Suddenly, she whirled around and looked all of us directly in the eye. I felt my skin crawl as she continued.

“It’s very important that you treat this as a matter of life and death. Because now, it really is.”

In this case, the character interrupting her own dialogue to stare at everyone stands out because she stopped her own speech to do so.

Writing pauses into your dialogue

Sometimes, your characters may pause in their dialogue even if they’re not interrupted. When this happens, you can use the techniques we already described (such as cutting certain words off with hyphens) to express the pause.

Ellipses (better known as the three dots, or “…”) are a great way to show that a character has trailed off. This may indicate they’re deep in thought or having an emotional reaction to what they’re thinking.

Likewise, the em-dash is a great way to express a sudden pause in what a character is saying. While ellipses indicate a slow trailing off, an em dash indicates a sudden stop. This may indicate that a character had a sudden thought or is beginning to react to something that another character said or did.

Writing dialogue for specific scenarios

So far, we’ve focused primarily on basic dialogue tips that apply to almost any scenario. However, different scenarios sometimes call for a different way of writing dialogue. Let’s review a few different scenarios and how to structure your dialogue for each one.

Writing military dialogue

Military dialogue is often difficult for writers. That’s mostly because unless the writer has been in the military before, they probably have a distorted view of how soldiers actually speak.

For example, we’ve all read a book or watched a movie that involves a hardened soldier giving a deep and introspective speech. For fantasy fans, perhaps the most famous version of this comes from Aragorn in the movie adaptation of Return of the King :

Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers, I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!

However, soldiers are typically very direct and goal-oriented in conversations as well as action and speech. Your average soldier is far likelier to engage in quick banter and dirty jokes with a colleague than to get seriously introspective.

Additionally, your military characters should use slang and acronyms correctly. For example, a World War II soldier is far likelier to call white phosphorous by its nickname “Willy Pete” than by its proper name. Modern soldiers are likelier to phonetically say an acronym rather than spell it out (i.e., a soldier would say “Dima” rather than spell out “D-M-A” in speech when referring to a “defense media activity.”) It’s important to get this right because soldiers are likelier to use specialized terms and acronyms than civilians are.

Finally, try to avoid using military cliches whenever possible. Such cliches may include famous movie lines like “stay frosty” or generic action lines like “come get some” or “lock and load.” These cliches can make your fictional soldiers sound more like generic action heroes, and this really takes readers out of the story.

Writing scientific dialogue

Interestingly, there’s some overlap between writing military dialogue and writing scientific dialogue. That’s because scientists, too, are likely to use a variety of specialized terms and acronyms. On top of that, their dialogue should be informed by actual science, so you’ll need to do extra research to make these characters sound authentic.

One tip for writing dialogue between scientists or any other specialists is to make sure they aren’t explaining things to each other that they should already know. For instance, if you’re writing a conversation between two accomplished scientists, one of them explaining what the Big Bang Theory is to the other would be completely absurd. If you must explain concepts to your readers, do so via narration rather than dialogue.

Finally, if your story is more of a science fiction story, try to make sure that conversations about your future technology are consistent with modern science. This helps to ground the narrative, and this grounding is doubly important in a fictional world full of futuristic wonders.

Writing drunk dialogue

Writing drunk characters is harder than you might imagine. There are multiple approaches you might take.

One of these approaches is to visually show that being drunk is affecting how someone speaks. You can do this by stretching out words with hyphens and extra letters (like turning “hey” into a “h-h-h-eeeeeyyyy”), or by having the character frequently trailing off or cutting themselves off with ellipses and em dashes (refer to our interrupted dialogue section for help with this). You might also turn short phrases into a single word (like turning “how are you doing” into “howryadoing”) to show slurred speech.

If you don’t want to visually represent drunken dialogue, you can always write the dialogue normally and use actions to indicate the character is drunk. For example:

“No, I’m fine,” he said, his body slightly lurching as soon as he stood up. “Stop bothering me.” It wasn’t clear who he was talking to because he couldn’t seem to focus on any one person.

This works especially well if you can accurately write the body language of a drunken person.

Writing slang in dialogue

Think of slang as a kind of “secret sauce” for your dialogue. This sauce can add a lot of flavor, but the last thing you want to do is use too much of it!

First, make sure you’re using slang accurately. Websites like Urban Dictionary can help you verify the exact meaning of a term. Urban Dictionary can also help you understand whether to use this bit of slang as a noun, a verb, or something else entirely.

Second, choose the right moments to use slang. Overusing slang is one of the quickest ways to annoy your readers, so it needs to be sprinkled into your story rather than poured.

Finally, make sure slang fits the character using it and fits into your existing dialogue. The last thing you want is for weirdly-placed slang to take the reader out of the story.

Writing child dialogue

Writing dialogue for children can be especially difficult. Tthe only way to really make it easier is to try to match the dialogue to the age and development of your characters.

For example, very young children (think two years old or younger) will communicate in short bursts of badly-spelled dialogue (“daddy” becoming “dadda,” for instance). When that same child is a little older, their dialogue should no longer be misspelled, but the sentences are still likely to be very short.

In later years, child dialogue may also reflect other developments. For example, a teenage character might alternate between short, sarcastic sentences and emotional outbursts. That’s because puberty, and the complex mix of emotions it engenders, can hover over a teenager like a cloud of radiation.

It may be helpful to read passages of short stories and books written for the age of the children you’re writing for. YA authors are typically more tuned into how children actually speak.

You can also research letters and other writings that children have written. A quick Google search for “letters written by children” will reveal some interesting examples that can give you an idea of what a child’s voice sounds like.

Finally, if possible, you should have your children’s dialogue reviewed by parents, teachers, and others who work with children. They can give you a better idea of whether you’re on target or far off the mark.

Adding emotion to dialogue

Of course, teenagers aren’t the only characters who might be prone to emotional outbursts. Your characters should all experience a full range of emotions, and these emotions may dictate how they communicate. Here are some ideas on how to incorporate anger, distress, and joy into your dialogue:

Writing screaming in dialogue

By the time a character is screaming, it’s safe to say they’ve lost control of themselves. There are different ways to express that loss of control in dialogue.

The most basic option is to end the character’s lines with exclamation points. As an additional flourish, you can describe what the character is doing while they’re talking (such as pacing, frantically looking around, and so on).

You can also visually set the screaming dialogue apart. Italics work best for this, though you shouldn’t overuse either technique.

Finally, be sure to showcase how others react to the scream. This helps convince the reader of how intense the noise really was.

Writing laughter in dialogue

Your characters are going to laugh from time to time. You have a few different options for showing that laughter in your dialogue.

The first option is to mix amused dialogue with action indicating laughter, such as “she laughed” or “he chuckled.” If the characters will be laughing a lot, make sure to change up the verbiage you use for the sake of variety.

Another option is to actually write the laughter out, such as writing out “ha ha.” Visually, this really stands out, so using it too often may become disruptive to your reader.

The third option is to write a shortened form of the laughter, such as a singular “ha.” This is useful for expressing dry amusement or showing that a character was mildly amused but didn’t break into full-throated laughter.

Mixing dialogue with actions

Even though you’re writing a story and not a screenplay, your characters should often be in motion. Showing characters taking action helps them appear more dynamic and helps to break up the dialogue.

Here are a few methods for incorporating common character actions into your dialogue:

Writing coughing in dialogue

A character may cough in the middle of speaking. This can indicate things like illness or a reaction to the environment. As usual, you have multiple options for writing coughing in dialogue.

The first option is to simply describe the cough. After a character speaks, and possibly after they cut themselves off, you can write a vivid description of the cough. The advantage of this approach is that you can flesh out whether this was a wet cough, a hacking cough, and so on.

The second option is to express the cough within the dialogue itself as a form of onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia refers to words that are spelled like how they sound. For example, “buzz” and “hum.” With some creativity, you can create unique words to indicate that a character’s dialogue suddenly turned into a cough.

Writers may use words like “ahem” to show a character clearing their throat (and probably getting the attention of the room). To express more sudden and violent coughs, you could always write out kaff , khoff , khak , and so on, with the sound written as a word in italics.

Writing stuttering in dialogue

Whether it’s due to fear, excitement, or a speech condition, our characters sometimes stutter. The only real way to express this in dialogue is to have the first letter or consonant followed by hyphens. Do this multiple times and then complete the word, like “h-h-how’s it going?”

Don’t overuse stuttering in your dialogue. Otherwise, instances of stuttering will lose their impact.

Writing eating in dialogue

One of the most common actions your characters can take is eating. This means you must know how to properly write eating into your dialogue.

The most basic way of doing this is to describe the characters’ eating in actions between dialogue. For example, after a character finishes a sentence, you may write that “He then forked the remains of the last pancake through the syrup on his plate with deliberate intensity.”

While it’s not polite, our characters may sometimes end up speaking with their mouths full. To express this, you can merge words in creative ways, similar to slurred speech. From a person eating, “stop it” may come out more like “stoppid.” Depending on what the character is eating and saying, you may need to replace various syllables (for example, “cutting” may sound like “cuhhing” from a character who is biting down on something and can’t use their tongue).

Another option is to express the act of eating within the dialogue itself. For example:

“Wow, these tacos”— crunch —“you can really taste every flavor”— slorp —“I could eat these all day!”

If you want to sound convincing, research isn’t very hard to do. Just record yourself talking with your mouthful as you try to say the dialogue in question. This gives you a perfect reference as you write!

How to write better dialogue every time

Dialogue is hard to learn and even harder to master. But serious writers know that mastery is rewarding because it helps you craft the most convincing characters and the most compelling stories!

Now that you know a few of our best tips for writing dialogue, it’s time to put those skills to use. Next time you sit down to write, you can begin using these dialogue tips and tricks to create exchanges between your characters that practically leap off the page.

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Your Guide to Writing Better Dialogue

Writing dialogue is hard work.

You’re tasked with capturing the natural cadence of language and the reflexive dynamic of human conversation. That ain’t easy. And I’m sad to say that most writers don’t get it right.

You see, most writers fall into one of two groups: either they hate writing dialogue and try to avoid it as much as humanly possible or they love writing dialogue and fill their entire novel with mostly useless exchanges.

But there’s a third group that few writers join. It’s the group of writers who understand the importance of dialogue in a story. They know how to use dialogue as a tool to enhance their storytelling. That’s the group that you want to be a part of, and in this post, I’m showing you exactly how to join them.

Let’s get started.

Write better dialogue and avoid common pitfalls with this list of do’s and don’ts. Subscribe to receive this extra resource.

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Why Use Dialogue?

Most novels can benefit from well-written dialogue.

Dialogue is a useful tool for developing your characters and moving your plot forward. Dialogue can help you establish the backstory, and it can reveal important plot details that the reader may not know about yet.

Dialogue is great for ratcheting up the tension between characters.

Dialogue can also establish the mood. By playing off characters’ verbal exchanges, you can set an atmosphere for each scene. Remember that there’s tension in what’s spoken, and especially in what’s not spoken.

All dialogue should pass the following criteria:

• It must move the story forward. After each conversation or exchange, the reader should be one step closer to either the climax or the conclusion of your story.
• It should reveal relevant information about the character. The right dialogue will give the reader insight into how the character feels, and what motivates him or her to act.
• It must help the reader understand the relationship between the characters.

If your dialogue doesn’t accomplish all of the above, it is a waste of words.

Now, let’s take a look at how to write the best dialogue for your story.

Top Tips for Better Dialogue

Here’s what you need to know to write forward-focused dialogue:

Keep it brief

Dialogue shouldn’t go over for pages and pages. If that happens, you should probably be writing a play, and not a novel.

The best dialogue is brief. It’s a slice and not the whole pizza. You don’t need to go into lengthy exchanges to reveal an important truth about the characters, their motivations, and how they view the world.

Plus, dialogue that goes on for too long can start to feel like a tennis match with the reader switching back and forth between characters. Lengthy dialogue can be exhausting for the reader. Pair the dialogue down to the minimum that you need for the characters to say to each other.

Avoid small talk

Oh, this one is music to my introvert ears.

In your novel, never ever waste your dialogue with small talk.

In the real world, small talk fills in the awkward silence, but in the world of your novel, the only dialogue to include is the kind that reveals something necessary about the character and/or plot.

How’s the weather? doesn’t move the plot.

If you’d like to show that your character doesn’t like awkward pauses, work on characterization and scene description. Instead of using mind-numbingly long exchanges, show the character’s discomfort by describing how she taps her fingers against the window pane, or takes a series of sharp sighs.

Don’t try to make your dialogue sound too “real” by including small talk. Small talk can water down the effectiveness of your scene. Instead, pick exchanges that capture the essence of the moment, and bypass small talk altogether. Let that be an understood nod between you and the reader, and dive right into the action.

So, instead of starting with “Hey, how are you?” “I’m fine, how are you?”, start with the action: “I can’t believe you’re showing your face around here after what you did to Papa.”

Don’t info dump

While you can certainly use dialogue to learn more about your characters, you shouldn’t use it to dump a whole lot of information on the reader.

It’s cringeworthy to read a dialogue exchange that starts with:

“As you know…”

If the character already knows, then why is the other character repeating it? I also hate when characters (especially villains) go into lengthy reasons why they did or are doing X, Y, Z.

No one talks like that. No one interacts like that.

If you must info dump, don’t do it in dialogue. Info dump slows dialogue to a grinding halt. It sounds awkward. And it actually insults the reader.

So, what’s the difference between info dumping and revealing relevant information? Info dump is a large amount of exposition given all at once, and left for the reader to sort out. Relevant information is more subtle, and it’s dispensed a little at a time.

Give your characters a unique way of speaking

Every character, just like every person you know, will have a unique way of speaking and delivering their thoughts.

Some people are more forceful and deliberate. Others are more passive and meandering. You can honor these (and other) different styles without rambling. My preferred method is to focus on word choice.

For example, to show that someone is rather gruff or abrupt, go towards single syllable or somewhat quick words, like “yeah.”

But, if I were looking for words for a charming character, I’d choose more graceful phrasing, like “of course.”

Same basic concept but different delivery, based on character.

Of course, word choice alone can’t dictate character. You’ll do most of this through characterization, but word choice should subtly support and reinforce characterization.

Along with word choice, I also like establishing a pattern of speech. Does the character speak in a sharp staccato, or a deliberate, flowy manner? By knowing how the character (especially the protagonist) speaks, you can create consistency whenever the character dialogues with others.

Be consistent

Remember to be consistent with your characters. Someone who speaks in a self-depreciating and shy demeanor won’t automatically become bold and acerbic.

When your characters speak, they should stay true to who they are. Even without character tags, the reader should be able to figure out who’s talking.

Create suspense

Use dialogue to increase the suspense between characters.

It’s human nature for people to withhold what they’re truly thinking or feeling. People leave a lot unsaid, and this is also true for the characters in your novel. To create a realistic interaction between your characters, you must honor the fact that most people leave a lot of things unsaid.

But that doesn’t mean that the reader can’t be privy to what’s being left unsaid. As a writer, you can build the scene, show the characters’ motivations and desires before the scene, and let it play out, with the reader wanting a resolution that doesn’t quite happen.

Answer the following questions to setup your scene for suspense:

• Does one character have the upper hand in the scene?
• Is the other character seething just under the surface?
• What does the reader find out through the exchange?

You can control all of this through dialogue.

Honor the relationship

Characters tend to speak differently based on who they’re speaking to. A character will speak to his mother differently than he does to his best friend. That’s not a shift in consistency. It actually gives more depth and realness to the character.

You can still stay true to the personality you’ve created by using the same speech pattern.

Show, don’t tell

“Show, don’t tell” is the writer’s mantra. When writing dialogue, it’s easy to start “telling” what the characters are feeling instead of showing it.

Instead of your character saying, “I’m angry, Jan!” describe how the character’s body is closed-- tight lips, narrow eyes, deep breaths.

Don’t underestimate your reader. The reader likes to see the scene, pick up the cues and come to the conclusion, instead of being told what to think.

Your dialogue shouldn’t be completely on the nose, and explain exactly what the character is feeling. Most people-- including your characters-- aren’t always aware of how they feel. And sometimes, what they say they feel is different from what they truly feel.

So, don’t get lazy with your dialogue. Use it to reveal characters, but not directly.

By the way, body language is an important part of dialogue, and should be written into every scene. It gives the reader important clues that they’ll use to recreate the scene in their mind.

Minimize identifying tags

“He said, she said” gets boring after a while. And the answer isn’t to switch out those “said” tags with other words like “enthused” or “shouted”. (By the way, when it doubt, “said” wins out.)

Not only is it boring for the reader to constantly see “he said” or “said she”, it’s also disruptive. Identifiers take the reader out of the immersive world of your story and reminds them that you, the author, are relaying a story. That can be pretty jarring, and it can happen if you use identifiers too often.

Of course, you can’t not use identifiers. They’re vital for establishing who’s speaking, but can be minimized by doing the following:

• Creating a unique pattern of speech, as we discussed above.
• Using descriptive follow ups. (i.e. “That’s not what I said.” Vincent reached for the rock.)

I love the second option. You can show what the characters are doing to further emphasize their words, or add context to the scene.

Greetings and goodbyes aren’t always necessary

While it’s only polite to say hello and bid adieu, it’s not necessary in novel dialogue to document these courtesies. You can use exposition for salutations, but do avoid writing a blow-by-blow. Instead, set up the scene by describing how the character enters or leaves the scene.

Avoid speeches and soliloquies

Most people, in conversation form, do not have the privilege of extended speech. They’re almost always interrupted because who wants to listen to someone natter on and on?

Read it aloud

During the editing process, you should always read your manuscript aloud, but do pay special attention to your dialogue.

If the dialogue doesn’t seem to flow, or you’re tripping over your words, it’s not going to sound right to the reader.

Even though you’re not capturing every part of a conversation in your dialogue, everything that’s written should sound like an actual person said it. If not, it’s time to erase and try again.

Additional Resources

Before you go, check out these related posts:

• How to Set the Mood in Your Novel
• Are Your Characters Under-Developed? Here's a Helpful Guide to Find Out
• Tension! What It Is & How to Develop It In Your Novel

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Crystal Hana Kim on Writing as a Mother, the Korean Diaspora, and How to Structure a Page-Turner

The author of “the stone home” in conversation with jimin han.

I first met Crystal Hana Kim at Women and Children First Bookstore in Chicago in 2017 for a book event, just after she won the 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She greeted me with warm enthusiasm and we spoke about Korean history.

Her debut novel, If You Leave Me , set in Korea in the 1950s, was published the following year. She was a Five Under Thirty-five recipient from the National Book Foundation in 2022. She now lives in New York City, she grew up, and has just published her much anticipated second novel.

The Stone Home is about a little-known community of Koreans forced into a government reformatory in the 1980s. Years later in 2011 a survivor of this institution is confronted by a young Korean American woman from the United States who is searching for answers to secrets her father never shared.

I had a chance to meet Kim over Zoom as she balanced caring for her young family and preparing for her book tour. We talked about her initial doubts, the themes she’s drawn to, and the writing process that keeps her excited about her work.

– Jimin Han

Jimin Han : The existence of an institution like the Stone Home is such a hidden piece of Korean history. What were your initial feelings about writing about it?

Crystal Hana Kim : As a writer who has strong ties to Korea, who grew up going to Korea a lot to visit family, there’s still a distance that’s not only geographic, but cultural too. My first novel was set during the Korean War, which I did not experience, but which I had heard about all my life from family members. With my second, I thought I would inch closer to the present, to an experience that’s more similar to my own as a Korean American.

But I’ve found that as a writer, I enjoy looking back at history in order to understand our present condition. As a part of the diaspora, I want to carefully think about how I’m engaging with subject matter, especially when it comes to real-life atrocities.

JH : So you have Narae at the start of the book, the character who grows up in the United States, asking about her family origins.

CHK :  Yes, Narae’s of the diaspora, so she’s a way into the novel for us. Through her narrative, which is set in 2011, I could show the repercussions of these institutions. She’s able to examine the larger political landscape in a way that the characters within it can’t.

Originally, my first draft had two alternating narrators: Sangchul in 1980 and Narae in 2011. Narae’s whole narrative was just her quest to learn more about her father, but I realized that she needed to have a smaller role, which is why I relegated her to the frame of the novel. I needed a foil within the Stone Home to be on a parallel but diverging track from Sangchul. That’s how I came up with Eunju who really, to me, is the heart of the novel.

JH : Eunju and Sangchul are such complex characters. As young teenagers, they both felt so much responsibility and had to maneuver through all sorts of alliances.

CHK : This question of alliance, and how we hold onto the ones we love was something I wanted to explore in this book. My first novel examines the limits of romantic love. For my second novel, I wanted to explore sibling love, friendship love, love for your community, and how they can carry you through.

JH : Another way that the book was a page-turner for me was the structure. You’ve got short chapters, you utilize first person and third person point of views, and two timelines. How did you make decisions about that?

CHK : The Stone Home is looking at such an important part of not only Korean history, but our universal history. I wanted to help the reader look at and learn about and consider these characters’ lives, even with its difficult subject matter. Super short chapters was a way to keep the reader engaged. The alternating first and third perspectives were really important to me. Another theme that I’m always interested in, and that comes up in both my books, is this idea of storytelling, how there can be multiple truths based on who is telling the story.

JH : Yes, I love that. Totally comes through. In terms of how Sangchul and Eunju and everyone in the home were treated–the brutality was so harrowing. I was so surprised that there weren’t more security guards to enforce the rules that kept them captive in the Stone Home.

CH : Something that I thought was really interesting was that not only in these institutions in Korea, but in other instances of this sort of oppression, in Nazi concentration camps or in First Nations boarding schools or the Dozier School for Boys, these institutions create a culture where it benefits the imprisoned to turn against one another, to oppress their peers. I wanted to examine our human compulsion to protect ourselves. I also wanted to contrast it with characters who form community and find strength in collective stability.

JH : Let’s talk about your title. It’s so inviting, that word “home,” but it’s a shocking contrast to what the place actually was in your book. How did you come up with it? Was it always going to be “The Stone Home?”

CHK : No, I find titles so difficult. That’s always the last thing I come up with. I wanted to play with this idea of home. What is home? Where and who do we call home? In the novel itself I wanted to mirror the name of the Brothers Home, which is the real-life institution in South Korea my novel’s institution is based on.

It always struck me as interesting that a place of such brutality had the word “home” in its name. I wanted to contrast that false comfort with the idea of stone, which is something that evokes hardness, coldness, but can also be something that endures.

JH : I was on a panel at the last AWP Conference on the challenges of the second novel. How was it for you to write a second book?

CHK : The sophomore novel can feel daunting. My life, personally, has changed so much. Between the first book and the second, the Covid-19 pandemic happened, which I think changed everyone’s relationship to time and health. I also had two kids. The time I can devote to writing feels even more precious and important to my mental and emotional well-being.

In the end though, with this second book, I knew no matter how difficult it was, no matter how far away a full draft felt, no matter how hazy the path forward, I had a sense in my gut that I would be able to finish a book I would be proud of one day. So, even though the daily writing was difficult, and I had new constraints as a mother, I felt in my core that I would reach this point.

JH : Was your process the same in how you wrote both novels?

CHK : The first and second book were similar in that I had to write my way to find the form. My first drafts are quite exploratory, I don’t think it’s the most efficient way to write, because I’m writing to figure out basic questions like: Is this the right narrator? There are a lot of pages that have to be tossed out. Sometimes I wish I was a planner, an outliner, because it would make that initial drafting process easier.

JH : I’m like you, I have to write a lot to find my way. Those planners are lucky. The name of that AWP panel was “Unlearning What We Learned Just Now.” With The Stone Home, was there anything that you had to unlearn to write it?

CHK : I would say my relationship to time had to be unlearned. I had a good amount of it in graduate school and then after graduate school, I got a nonprofit job, which I enjoyed, but my main focus was the book. That was what I did on the weekends and evenings, and that was the great propeller of my life.

Then, with the second book, I had one kid in the summer of 2020, when we were all shut down with the pandemic, and another kid in 2023. So my sense of time that I have for myself definitely changed. I had to unlearn some habits.

For example, with my first book I thought I needed long stretches of time. I needed a candle lit, I needed my crystals, I thought I needed specific conditions to write. With my second novel, I realized I didn’t need any of that. I just needed a laptop, and maybe like an hour, you know? I learned how to focus with smaller amounts of time.

JH : Yes, I can see that. It’s amazing though that you were still able to write a second book with so much change in your life. You’ve also received numerous awards and recognition for your work while all this was going on. How have they impacted your relationship to writing?

CHK :  You know, when I’m writing, I really try not to think of outside expectations. I’m more focused on my relationship to the characters, and how I can make it the best possible story it can be. If I was thinking about audience expectation, that would really stymie me.

As a writer, I want to continually become better at my craft. I want to challenge myself. With my first book, the timeline spanned sixteen years. There were five narrators, and it was kind of sprawling in that way. For the second book, I wanted to confine the story to one year and keep the narrative mostly in one location, within the institution, so I could build up pressure.

I try to create these craft challenges to make the writing interesting to me. We can’t control the whims of the publishing industry, right? But I can control the quality of my work.

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Baltimore bridge collapse: a bridge engineer explains what happened, and what needs to change

Associate Professor, Civil Engineering, Monash University

Disclosure statement

Colin Caprani receives funding from the Department of Transport (Victoria) and the Level Crossing Removal Project. He is also Chair of the Confidential Reporting Scheme for Safer Structures - Australasia, Chair of the Australian Regional Group of the Institution of Structural Engineers, and Australian National Delegate for the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering.

Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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When the container ship MV Dali, 300 metres long and massing around 100,000 tonnes, lost power and slammed into one of the support piers of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, the bridge collapsed in moments . Six people are presumed dead, several others injured, and the city and region are expecting a months-long logistical nightmare in the absence of a crucial transport link.

It was a shocking event, not only for the public but for bridge engineers like me. We work very hard to ensure bridges are safe, and overall the probability of being injured or worse in a bridge collapse remains even lower than the chance of being struck by lightning.

However, the images from Baltimore are a reminder that safety can’t be taken for granted. We need to remain vigilant.

So why did this bridge collapse? And, just as importantly, how might we make other bridges more safe against such collapse?

A 20th century bridge meets a 21st century ship

The Francis Scott Key Bridge was built through the mid 1970s and opened in 1977. The main structure over the navigation channel is a “continuous truss bridge” in three sections or spans.

The bridge rests on four supports, two of which sit each side of the navigable waterway. It is these two piers that are critical to protect against ship impacts.

And indeed, there were two layers of protection: a so-called “dolphin” structure made from concrete, and a fender. The dolphins are in the water about 100 metres upstream and downstream of the piers. They are intended to be sacrificed in the event of a wayward ship, absorbing its energy and being deformed in the process but keeping the ship from hitting the bridge itself.

The fender is the last layer of protection. It is a structure made of timber and reinforced concrete placed around the main piers. Again, it is intended to absorb the energy of any impact.

Fenders are not intended to absorb impacts from very large vessels . And so when the MV Dali, weighing more than 100,000 tonnes, made it past the protective dolphins, it was simply far too massive for the fender to withstand.

Read more: I've captained ships into tight ports like Baltimore, and this is how captains like me work with harbor pilots to avoid deadly collisions

Video recordings show a cloud of dust appearing just before the bridge collapsed, which may well have been the fender disintegrating as it was crushed by the ship.

Once the massive ship had made it past both the dolphin and the fender, the pier – one of the bridge’s four main supports – was simply incapable of resisting the impact. Given the size of the vessel and its likely speed of around 8 knots (15 kilometres per hour), the impact force would have been around 20,000 tonnes .

Bridges are getting safer

This was not the first time a ship hit the Francis Scott Bridge. There was another collision in 1980 , damaging a fender badly enough that it had to be replaced.

Around the world, 35 major bridge collapses resulting in fatalities were caused by collisions between 1960 and 2015, according to a 2018 report from the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure. Collisions between ships and bridges in the 1970s and early 1980s led to a significant improvement in the design rules for protecting bridges from impact.

Further impacts in the 1970s and early 1980s instigated significant improvements in the design rules for impact.

The International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering’s Ship Collision with Bridges guide, published in 1993, and the American Association of State Highway and Transporation Officials’ Guide Specification and Commentary for Vessel Collision Design of Highway Bridges (1991) changed how bridges were designed.

In Australia, the Australian Standard for Bridge Design (published in 2017) requires designers to think about the biggest vessel likely to come along in the next 100 years, and what would happen if it were heading for any bridge pier at full speed. Designers need to consider the result of both head-on collisions and side-on, glancing blows. As a result, many newer bridges protect their piers with entire human-made islands.

Of course, these improvements came too late to influence the design of the Francis Scott Key Bridge itself.

Lessons from disaster

So what are the lessons apparent at this early stage?

First, it’s clear the protection measures in place for this bridge were not enough to handle this ship impact. Today’s cargo ships are much bigger than those of the 1970s, and it seems likely the Francis Scott Key Bridge was not designed with a collision like this in mind.

So one lesson is that we need to consider how the vessels near our bridges are changing. This means we cannot just accept the structure as it was built, but ensure the protection measures around our bridges are evolving alongside the ships around them.

Second, and more generally, we must remain vigilant in managing our bridges. I’ve written previously about the current level of safety of Australian bridges, but also about how we can do better.

This tragic event only emphasises the need to spend more on maintaining our ageing infrastructure. This is the only way to ensure it remains safe and functional for the demands we put on it today.

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Heat 2's Michael Mann Gives Script and Casting Update, Will Start Right Where First Movie Ends

Michael Mann has provided an update regarding Heat 2 .

Speaking on the podcast " Table For Two With Bruce Bozzi ," per ScreenRant , Mann confirmed that he's currently still writing the screenplay for the upcoming sequel to 1995's Heat . He also revealed that Heat 2 will begin right where the first movie left off and noted he's "had some conversations with some people" about casting.

What did Michael Mann say about Heat 2?

"I'm writing the screenplay right now," Mann said. "And it comes from having so much background and then protracting where some of these lives go. What I had to figure out is a device, a story, that can keep the end of it and the beginning – it is a prequel and a sequel. Starts in '88, it actually starts on the first day after the end of the movie with Val Kilmer trying to get out of L.A.

"He's wounded and half delirious. And then it goes back to 1988 and they're very different people. They're not the people they are in the movie. It's the events of '88 that made them into the people they are in the movie. So the De Niro character, Neil McCauley, is deep into a relationship with a woman, he has a stepdaughter. He has all these attachments. And then what happens in 2000 takes us into a whole different world, transnational organized crime and Ciudad del Este, which is a free trade zone in South America and Southeast Asia.

"I've had some conversations with some people, but I can't really cast until the screenplay is written."

Mann and Reed Farrel Coleman wrote a novel, published in 2022, that serves as a sequel to Heat. Mann confirmed plans to turn the novel into a movie, which is expected to begin filming this year. It's been rumored that Adam Driver - who starred in Mann's last movie, Ferrari - could play in the upcoming film, though his casting has not been confirmed at this time.

Heat 2 does not yet have a release date.

The post Heat 2's Michael Mann Gives Script and Casting Update, Will Start Right Where First Movie Ends appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More .

Carolyn Hax: A second career as an author nets three books, zero spousal support

Dear Carolyn: Is it unreasonable of me to want my spouse to congratulate me? When I retired, I started writing and have now published three books and several magazine articles. While I’m far from a bestseller, my spouse has never said anything positive — or anything at all — when they were published.

I don’t expect flowers or a special dinner, but some kind of recognition would be nice. Am I being unreasonable?

Author: I use this answer sparingly, for obvious reasons, but here I think it’s apt:

The problem lies almost as much in your asking me as it does in your spouse’s silence.

Let’s back all the way up for a sec, to the beginning: What did you say to your spouse about the nonresponse when you published your first book?

First! Book! I mean, newspaper writers write a lot of books — so I know writers of big, little, multiple and best-selling books. And every time it’s a Big Deal. So much work.

About Carolyn Hax

Therefore, a notable thing happened to launch your writing career — and a notable thing did not happen in your marriage in response.

Yet we are talking about it now as if you haven’t broached the subject with your spouse, ever. So I am wondering what you said or did when you first witnessed the yawning void where a loved one’s normal supportive gestures would have been. Even superficial performative ones (in the event of differing tastes).

The response I’d expect is along these lines: “I just did something big; at least, it was big for me — and when you let a milestone like that go by without saying anything to me at all, I was stunned, and I still feel hurt.”

If you haven’t been that direct — if instead you’ve poked and nudged around the subject hoping your spouse would volunteer … something — then we’re long past treating this as a narrowly defined spousal failure to take you out to a celebratory dinner.

Because what you’re telling me here is the time between now and your last real conversation with your spouse can be measured in book publications. It has been at least three book publications since you and your spouse last told each other the truth.

Please give that idea careful thought. Weigh for how long and to what extent your marriage has calcified, then use those two data points to get at the why.

Then invite your spouse to talk. Really talk. And listen.

Congratulations on your new career, by the way, and good luck.

Dear Carolyn: My sister “Wendy” has always been the “marches to her own drummer” sibling. She’s smart, has a terrific job, a loving family, etc., but has always seemed a little out of step with the rest of the world.

Several years ago, “Liz” — another sister — took me aside and said she and her husband had started to think Wendy was somewhere on the autism spectrum. I felt a lot of Wendy-related things immediately click into place in my head and make sense.

Liz feels very strongly that we should say and do NOTHING. My feeling is equally strong in the other direction. I have two dear school friends who weren’t diagnosed with autism until their 50s. Both shared with me their enormous sense of relief and self-acceptance stemming from this diagnosis.

I have even suggested we share our thoughts with Wendy’s husband and allow him to raise the subject with Wendy in some gentle, organic way. Liz nixes this as well. I would really appreciate your thoughts.

— Indiana Sibling

Indiana Sibling: If you can forgive me for not weighing in on whether and what to tell Wendy, then I might have something useful to say about you and Liz.

You are not a “we” here. You are not joined by restrictions on privileged information, because Liz did not give you information that only she has access to or is supposed to have.

Liz didn’t give you information at all, in fact. Not about Wendy. All you got from Liz were her thoughts. You now have your thoughts, which you can give or not to anyone as you see fit.

You and Liz each know as much about Wendy as you ever did.

So, again, there’s no “we” in any conversations you do or don’t have with Wendy about information you don’t have. If you want to talk to Wendy someday about your experiences with your friends and connections you made to Wendy, then that’s your prerogative.

I do recommend talking about this with Liz before saying boo to Wendy, though, if that’s the way you decide to go here — and also saying nothing of Liz to Wendy. That’s basic accountability hygiene.

I also recommend thinking of Wendy in terms of Wendy and not in terms of your other friends. You can be so right about their sense of relief and still be wrong that Wendy will share it.

Maybe get out of your certainty for a bit, and really listen for things Liz understands about Wendy that you don’t (or vice versa). And that Wendy accepts in herself.

More from Carolyn Hax

From the archive:

A DNA test, the seeds of deception and a growing lie

He’s painfully shy - until it comes to manipulating his wife

The parents of her daughter’s friend cut her out. What can Mom do?

How to reject the advances of a recently widowed friend?

He got a new bod, new car, and now wants a new divorce

Sign up for Carolyn’s email newsletter to get her column delivered to your inbox each morning.

Carolyn has a Q&A with readers on Fridays. Read the most recent live chat here . The next chat is April 12 at 12 p.m.

Resources for getting help. Frequently asked questions about the column. Chat glossary

More From Forbes

How inflation benefits the wealthy and harms the working class.

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Inflation takes a big toll on low-wage earners in the U.S., especially if they were already living ... [+] paycheck to paycheck. They’re spending more money now on groceries and other basic necessities.

Inflation is an insidious "hidden tax," as it directly impacts the purchasing power of families in the United States. However, the burden is unevenly distributed across the different income and wealth strata. In fact, the upper middle class and the top 1% of Americans have actually benefited from high inflationary periods, increasing their wealth, while lower-wage families have been negatively impacted, according to a working paper by economist Edward Nathan Wolff for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Inflation can have varying effects on different wealth brackets with the middle class benefiting from real estate assets, but facing challenges in other areas. The "wealth effect" benefits those with substantial assets from increased asset values, like stocks, real estate and entrepreneurial endeavors.

The job market is a different story. The white-collar, college-educated laptop classes are in the midst of a richsession , finding it difficult to hold onto their jobs in a corporate environment focused on cost-cutting, workforce reductions and investments in artificial intelligence instead of people. Meanwhile, the blue-collar professions are relatively safe, as these jobs require in-person manual labor.

How The Rich Get Richer

The Federal Reserve Bank’s monetary policies, such as cutting interest rates and quantitative easing, contribute to the wealth effect that drives inflation and benefits the wealthy.

High earners have the wherewithal to weather inflation better than the working class, according to the American Enterprise Institute. This cohort has access to tax shelters, tax-free investments and other financial strategies that can help them minimize the impact of inflation on their taxes.

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The wealthy possess sufficient funds to make investments across the spectrum of the financial system. They have the resources to hire professional financial advisors to protect and grow their wealth. These professionals can find legal ways to hedge their portfolios, protecting from inflation's deleterious effects. However, they are having a harder time negotiating salaries and finding new jobs because companies are tightening their budgets. Employers may avoid hiring high-cost personnel when they feel AI could pick up the slack, along with bringing aboard a less expensive, junior person.

The Dilemma For Low-Wage Workers

Inflation takes a big toll on low-wage earners in the U.S., especially if they were already living paycheck to paycheck. This class does not possess the means to purchase inflation-resistant investments, such as stocks, gold or Bitcoin. They are usually renters who don’t reap the benefits of a home’s appreciation in value over the course of years.

They’re spending more money now on groceries and other basic necessities. For the working classes, inflation is a regressive tax that impacts them more acutely because they spend a higher percentage of their income on goods and services, with little left to provide for an emergency fund.

The White-Collar Job Market

In the current job market, white-collar workers are facing more challenges compared to blue-collar workers. The laptop class, typically those in office-based roles, are experiencing greater job insecurity and a slowdown in hiring compared to blue-collar workers who are seeing more opportunities. These headwinds include the specter of automation encroaching upon their future job security, the reticence of employers to pay out big compensation packages in a cost-efficient corporate cycle and jobs being offshored to arbitrage the difference between what an American earns compared to someone in a lower-cost location. These trends contribute to long and tedious job interview cycles and candidates getting ghosted . By comparison, blue-collar workers have a broader range of opportunities available to them across an array of sectors.

Blue-Collar Workers

Despite the overall job market cooling down for white-collar workers, blue-collar workers continue to benefit from robust hiring and increasing pay. This has helped them weather the economic challenges.

Blue-collar workers typically perform manual labor or skilled trades, like construction workers, electricians, plumbers and mechanics. They are in high demand and some are paid in the six figures. They tend to have health insurance and pensions paid out by their unions. Although these jobs are strenuous and require physical endurance on a daily basis, they are not carrying a burden of hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans.

Blue-collar workers have experienced significant wage growth , surpassing inflation rates for the first time in two years. This increase in hourly earnings has enabled these workers to maintain spending levels and has contributed to economic stability.

The demand for blue-collar workers surged as the economy reopened post-pandemic. Sectors like mining, logging and manufacturing have seen faster wage growth compared to information-based roles, providing more opportunities for blue-collar workers.

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