How to Make Your Characters Talk Like Real People
Because creating good dialogue is an art form
Dialogue is one of the five pillars of creative writing (the others being action, description, thought, and exposition). As such, your dialogue should always move the story forwards.
Bin the Mundane
Get rid of everything that isn’t interesting. This means small talk, greetings, repetition, etc.
For every piece of dialogue, ask yourself:
- What is the purpose of this exchange?
- Does it stimulate the reader’s curiosity?
- Does the exchange create or heighten tension?
Focus On Goals
Each character has story and scene goals. If you know what each of your characters wants, you can tap into the best sources of conflict.
Let’s say you’re writing a scene where a woman invites her childhood best friend to her wedding, except the two of them haven’t spoken in years because he fell in with a crowd she didn’t like.
She wants to be the bigger person and go back to having a relationship with him but hasn’t forgiven him for what he’s said and done. He wants her back and wants to be a better person, but he can’t bring himself to apologise and sneers every time her fiancé is mentioned.
Even though both characters want the same thing, their inner conflicts get in the way and will make the situation worse before it gets better — if it gets better.
Fight It Out
Dialogue needs conflict. It can be explicit (an argument) or implicit (two characters working towards different goals and therefore getting in each others’ way whether they mean to or not).
No dialogue should be an easy exchange because your characters shouldn’t say what they mean. If they’re honest about their desires, motivations, inner conflicts, etc. you’re setting yourself up for boring dialogue with no tension.
To hint at what’s being left unsaid, use subtext, sarcasm, body language, or whatever else you can think of.
If you want more conflict, add another character to the mix. For our example, the best option would be the woman’s fiancé. What does he want? What inner conflict gets in the way? How do his wants, needs, and insecurities clash with the other characters’?
Answering those questions is how you write scenes with multiple characters.
Get the Voices Right
If all your characters sound the same, if they use the same expressions, sentence structures, vocabulary, and speech quirks, their dialogue will fall flat and the characters won’t feel real.
Think about how the way your characters were raised has affected the way they speak.
Decide on their speech markers:
- vocabulary (polysyllabic words, professional jargon, etc.),
- throwaway words and phrases (actually, maybe, I think, you see, I dare say, anyway),
- long sentences,
- sarcasm,
- poor grammar,
- omitted words,
- levels of energy and formality,
- humour,
- confidence,
- speech quirks (ending every sentence as if it were a question, stuttering, etc.)
Accents
Writing accents is another way of differentiating one character’s speech from another’s, but you should avoid this unless you’re confident in your ability to convey an accent phonetically.
Even if you are confident, many readers struggle with this method because it forces them to “translate” the dialogue instead of listening to the characters.
Said Is Not Dead
You want the dialogue to speak for itself, which means the dialogue tag needs to be non-intrusive. When you start using tags like hissed, grumbled, exclaimed, spurted, cautioned, lied, etc., first off, you’re proving that your dialogue isn’t good enough to stand on its own.
That isn’t to say that you can’t use a variety of dialogue tags, but more often than not, use said.
Action Beats
Action beats convey more information than dialogue tags but don’t overuse them.
Polly grinned. “I promised you a mystery, didn’t I?”
Basil shuffled from one foot to the other, glancing around the corner at the courtyard. “I thought you meant a murder mystery, not this.”
She chuckled. “Let’s go.”
Too many action beats will crowd the scene and take readers’ attention away from the dialogue.
Another thing about action beats is that a lot of new writers overuse some of them. The ones that come to mind are “sigh”, “smile”, “grin”, “shrug”, and “nod”. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use them; just make sure you aren’t using them too often.
Punctuating Dialogue
A dialogue tag uses “speaking” verbs like said, muttered, shouted. An action beat is a description of what the character does while they’re talking. Laughing, smiling, pacing, etc. are action beats.
Gasping and sighing can be used as either, but keep in mind lung capacity. A person can gasp or sigh a word, not a long sentence.
- New speaker = new paragraph.
- The punctuation between the dialogue tag and the dialogue should be a comma. If the dialogue is a question or an exclamation, use a question or exclamation mark.
- The first word of dialogue should always start with an uppercase letter. If the dialogue tag follows the dialogue, its first letter should always be lower case unless the first word is a proper noun, like a character’s name.
She said, “It’s getting late.”
“How late?” he asked.
- When the dialogue tag interrupts the dialogue mid-sentence, use commas on either side and keep everything lower case.
“The bank closes in an hour,” she said, “so we should have plenty of time.”
- When the dialogue tag happens in the middle of dialogue but doesn’t interrupt any sentences, use a full stop after the tag and begin the next sentence with an uppercase letter.
“You don’t know that,” he said. “What if you’re wrong?”
- If you’re only using action beats, use full stops between them and the dialogue.
She looked at her watch. “It’s getting late.”
“I know.” He stood but didn’t start towards the car. “This is a terrible plan.”
- If an action or thought interrupts dialogue mid-sentence, use dashes without commas and keep everything lower case.
UK: ‘I wanted more’ – he threw the papers in the bin – ‘but you never cared!’
US: “I wanted more”—he threw the papers in the bin—“but you never cared!”
- Use an em-dash to show an abrupt end to the dialogue.
“I told you this was—”
- When quoting something within dialogue, use whichever quotation mark you aren’t using for your main dialogue.
UK: ‘Dad used to say, “Better to cry over spilt whiskey than spilt milk”, which should tell you everything you need to know about him.’
US: “Dad used to say, ‘Better to cry over spilt whiskey than spilt milk,’ which should tell you everything you need to know about him.”
- The US places the punctuation that follows the quote within the quote’s quotation marks. The UK places it outside the quote’s quotation marks unless the punctuation belongs to the quote.
- Use an em-dash and lower case capitalisation when your character didn’t hear the beginning of the dialogue.
“—and then he did something worse.”
- When dialogue gets long, separate it into multiple paragraphs, but only the last paragraph gets a closing quotation mark.
“The heist is simple. You and I go in through the front while the others wait out back. When the fire alarm goes off, we meet in the middle, grab what we can, and get out. The getaway car will be waiting down the street.
“Once this is over, we never have to speak to each other again.”
It sounds like a lot, and it is, but I promise it gets easier with practise and eventually you’ll do all of this without even thinking about it.