Nobody Talks Like That

How to write dialogue so readers will listen

Last week we talked about characters: making them real, making them unique, and making them drive the plot, rather than bumble along doing whatever the plot requires rather than what feels true to their character.

One key element of characterisation is dialogue, and dialogue is also one of the main building blocks of your novel (the others being action and narrative summary). It’s a huge part of your novel, and so making sure your dialogue works on multiple levels will really help elevate your writing.

For example, your dialogue might:

• Move the plot forward

• Develop a relationship between characters

• Reveal something about the person speaking

• Tell us about the world we’re in

All in one fell swoop.

If the only thing a piece of dialogue is doing is summarising part of the story, it’s not working hard enough.

At the same time, of course we want dialogue to sound natural, as if it might be spoken by a real person – which is another reason dialogue that summarises the plot often falls short. How often do we narrate what we’re doing or recap things in real life?

Here, then, are my top tips on writing natural-sounding, impactful, character-developing, world-building dialogue (see if you can say that fast!).

• Don’t slip into narrative summary

There are three major building blocks of your novel: dialogue (characters speaking), action (characters acting), and narrative summary (where events are summarised to show the passage of time, share backstory, or give an overview of things). Balancing these three helps you control the pacing of your novel, and you can choose which will best convey the information you need to share with the reader. If they’re imbalanced, the reading experience will be impacted; e.g. if your novel is nearly all action, your readers will never get a rest, and struggle to take everything in.

When your dialogue slips into narrative summary – when your characters start telling the story, instead of talking naturally – it throws the balance off. Narrative summary is super helpful for condensing time, or for slowing the pacing for a while, so if your dialogue also acts as narrative summary, overall your pace really drops. It’s also quite hard to read long passages of narrative summary one after the other; we want to see characters interacting and showing us what happens, rather than just having things described.