A Quick Start Guide To Writing Dialogue

In this post, we explore what dialogue should do and how to write it – with examples. We’ve created a quick start guide to writing dialogue.

Read the other posts in our Quick Start series:

1. A Quick Start Guide To Creating Characters
2. A Quick Start Guide To Writing Fantasy
3. A Quick Start Guide For Beating Writer’s Block
4. A Quick Start Guide To Writing For Children
5. A Quick Start Guide To Writing YA Fiction
6. A Quick Start Guide To Writing A Memoir
7. A Quick Start Guide To Writing Descriptions
8. A Quick Start Guide To Writing Romance
9. A Quick Start Guide To Writing Science Fiction
10. A Quick Start Guide To Foreshadowing
11. A Quick Start Guide To Writing An Inciting Incident
12. A Quick Start Guide To Writing Dialogue
13. A Quick Start Guide To Writing Crime Fiction

A Quick Start Guide To Writing Dialogue

The first piece of advice a new writer is always given is to make their dialogue sound realistic. This is so wrong it’s frightening.

Have you ever sat in a coffee shop and listened to people talking? They jump like fleas from one topic to another. Every sentence has ‘um’, ‘er’, long pauses, inane conversation about the weather, minutes of ‘hi how are you’, ‘how’s the family’, ‘how’s work’, etc. No one wants pages of that. What they do want is dialogue that sounds natural.

Bad dialogue sounds stilted. The best way to decide if you’ve written bad dialogue is to read it to someone else. If you find yourself tripping over words, missing words etc, then it’s bad dialogue. Great dialogue takes almost forensic observation of how people talk, not necessarily what they talk about. It also takes practice. Lots of practice.

What should dialogue do?

1. It should give the reader information – but not as an info dump.
2. it should be active, moving the plot along, not waffling about things that have no relevance to the plot.
3. It should be relevant to the genre. New York City police are unlikely to talk like Mr Darcy from Regency England.
4. It should reveal plot, character, motives, emotions or lack of them, truth, and lies, clues, etc. As Hercule Poirot says, “If you let people talk, they will tell you everything you need to know.”
5. It should align with the tone of the book, the era it’s set in, and the age, education, intellectual ability, idiosyncrasies, and general outlook of the speaker, the location in which the book is set, and the interior landscape of the book. For example, if you were reading a book featuring Jeeves and Wooster by PG Wodehouse, you would rightly expect Wooster to say things like, “What ho, my good man,” and not, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
   

Dialogue should always:

1. Be on a new line, unless it follows an identifying action.
2. Can start or end with ‘said John’ – for example.
3. Should always end with a comma if followed by a dialogue tag. For example, “I’d love to go the fair,” said Maria.
4. If there is no following identification tag, then the dialogue should end with a full stop, or, if necessary, a question mark. Use exclamation points with strict restraint.
5. Be used often enough so that readers don’t lose track of who’s talking.

However, if you have ‘said John’, ‘said Mary’ after every line, that becomes boring and interferes with the story.

You only need dialogue tags a.k.a. identification tags when:

1. A new person speaks.
   Imagine a conversation taking place between two people, when a third person walks into the room and speaks. The reader needs to know, clearly and immediately, that it was the third person talking. For example, Agatha Christie’s famous detective Poirot and his sidekick, Hastings are talking about a body has been found in Professor Plum’s kitchen. We know there are only the two of them in the room. Then we read, “I’ve booked you tickets for the 10am train from Paddington,” said Miss Lemon from the doorway. If we didn’t have the ‘said Miss Lemon’, we wouldn’t know who was talking.
2. Every third or fourth line when only two people are having a conversation and haven’t mentioned the other’s names in their own dialogue.
   This prevents confusion on the part of the reader if the two people speaking very similar ways of expressing themselves. It’s best to have the characters use each other’s names occasionally. Young children are more likely to use the other person’s name more often.
3. More than two people are part of the conversation
   Even if each character has a different way of expressing themselves, if there are more than two people in the conversation, dialogue tags keep the reader grounded within the world of the story.
4. Stick as much as possible to he said/she said
   ‘John said’ disappears in the reader’s mind. But phrases like ‘John reiterated’, will pull readers out of the story.

4 Times You Don’t Need Dialogue Tags

1. When the characters speaking have very obviously different ways of speaking.
   For example, Englishman Hastings uses expressions like ‘Jolly good’, ‘I say’, Surely not’. Whereas Poirot, who is Belgian and speaks French, litters his speech with French expressions like ‘Mon ami’, ‘Bonjour,’ Mais, oui’. His sentence structure is not completely English. We don’t need dialogue tags because the way they talk gives us the clues we need. However, you shouldn’t leave out dialogue tags for too long. TOP TIP: Give everyone a different way of speaking. It can be subtle such as word choice based on the age of the character, or obvious, like Poirot and Hastings, Jeeves and Wooster, Groot, or Yoda.
2. When a character has used another character’s name in their dialogue.
   For example: “But, surely, Poirot, we can’t possibly know how the body came to be lying on the kitchen table unless we go and see for ourselves!”
   Clearly this is not Poirot speaking, so it must be Hastings. We don’t need a ‘said Hastings’ dialogue tag.
3. When the identifying tag is an action the speaker is making
   For example: Poirot took out his cigarette case and chose a slim turquoise one. “Mon ami, I need only apply my little grey cells, and I could tell you how.” TOP TIP: If you use an action tag to define who is speaking, it’s advisable to have the action tag first and the dialogue running straight on after it and not on a new line.
4. Avoid emotional dialogue tags.
   For example, “I can’t bear it any longer!” she exclaimed despairingly. [It’s too much, and it’s not great writing.] Compare that with, “I can’t bear it any longer!” The despair was written in every line on her face.

The Last Word

If you’d like to learn how to write great dialogue, sign up for one of the rich and in-depth workbooks and courses that Writers Write offers and get your dialogue off to a great start.

by Elaine Dodge. Author of The Harcourts of Canada series and The Device Hunter, Elaine trained as a graphic designer, then worked in design, advertising, and broadcast television. She now creates content, mostly in written form, including ghost writing business books, for clients across the globe, but would much rather be drafting her books and short stories.

More Posts From Elaine

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2. What Is True Crime & How Do I Write It?
3. How To Write A Paranormal Story
4. What Is Fan Fiction & How Do I Write It?
5. The 6 Pillars Of Young Adult Fiction
6. Figurative Language – Definition & Examples
7. The 5 Pillars Of Speculative Fiction
8. The 4 Pillars Of Women’s Fiction
9. The 6 Pillars Of Westerns
10. How To Write A Bestselling Book

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