Do you have any tips for making dialog more realistic? And for making it pop?
My number one tip for anyone seeking to make their dialogue more realistic is simply this: Listen.
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Go places and listen to the way people talk. Hear the difference in how two people who know each other well speak versus two strangers. Listen to the difference in people with different power dynamics like a boss and employee. Hear how that employee talks when the boss isn’t around. Listen to regional dialects, little sayings, inflections, word usage. Every part of America, and indeed the world, has its own bespoke idiosyncrasies.
If you take the time to listen to the voices of someone like your character, or from the same place, then you will hear that unique voice you can use to make your characters read authentically.
But you don’t want everyone to sound the same. Be aware of making characters unique. Some people use filler words (like, y’know, um, uh) and some don’t. Some people stutter or refuse to use profanity. Any little quirk like that can make that character sound unique even in a sea of other dialogue. Embrace it.
And don’t be afraid of letting your characters speak incorrectly. We don’t always follow rules of grammar in our speech, and even on the page and with the most ruthless editor, it can be more forgiving. I know plenty of people that never quite put a period on a sentence. They drift off with a “so…” or “and…yeah. Y’know?” You can use these quirks to your advantage.
If you do your listening, you’ll find that often people switch tenses during a story. You can use this in dialogue and it still reads clearly, where in prose it might not.
If someone is telling me about how they almost got in a car crash on the way to our lunch meeting, real-world dialogue might sound like:
“So I’m on my way over here and this, like, red van comes out of nowhere and ran a red light. I swear, he almost rammed right into me and I’m like, “Dammit!” And I slam on the brakes and skid for, like, ten feet. When I finally came to a stop I was only a foot away from the curb and a guy on a bike. He looks at me like, “woah, dude” and I’m like, “You saw that, right?” So yeah, that’s why I’m late. It was crazy. But I’m okay, so…”
Tenses change, POV changes, there are sentence fragments. A whole lot of rule breaking, grammar-wise. But in dialogue it reads so that you can hear it in your head in a true sounding voice.
If you listen not just to the sounds of voices or the specific word choices, you’ll find that people don’t often lay out exactly what they’re thinking or even their meaning in what they say. We tend to obscure and hide much of what we mean, letting facial expressions or implications do much of the work. This keeps your dialogue from sounding like exposition. We don’t narrate our lives to our partners in every day life. We let them fill in the gaps, and a writer should be comfortable doing that, too. Focus on what is not said and find the ways to get that info across in non-dialogue driven ways. Dialogue can be the thing that elevates your story or makes it sound uniquely you, but it can also be a crutch to dole out story points and over-clarify your plot. Most false-sounding dialogue falls into this category. Someone simply laying out what would be obvious to anyone in the scene.
“That door is closed!”
Yeah, no kidding, Sherlock. Anyone in the scene could tell that and the writer’s job is to put the reader in the room with the characters. So dialogue that sounds like scene description is bad dialogue. Dialogue shouldn’t force a reader to look somewhere or focus on something about to happen, or recount something that has just happened. Let it go, because the person in that scene sure would.
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If you plan on writing about a specific region, do your homework. Don’t rely solely on a Hollywood version of dialect. Language is ever-evolving and even in the most specific regional dialect, words and phrases are falling in and out of favor. Keep up with the new slang, the stuff that would mark someone as older or younger, as a native or a tourist.
Simple things like dropping a g on words like singin’ or fishin’ have a way of showing up in our heads as dialect already. Chances are you read both those words with some sort of southern drawl. Same as if I have a character call something ‘wicked pissah’ you might read that in a Boston accent.
Going too far or overdoing it can end up working against you, though. An actor can go into a cartoonish version of an accent on screen and the same happens on the page if you insist on typing out every accented word phonetically. It reads as caricature, not character, so use sparingly. Once a person is established in an accent or a speech pattern, the reader does a lot of the work for you.
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So get out there and do some eavesdropping. Bring a notebook and makes some notes, or maybe do some recording on the sly. Watch news reports from certain areas to hear how locals speak. Watch documentaries. Soak it all in and then you’ll be free to reproduce it on the page and it will play out in the reader’s mind in a colorful display of unique voices to populate your stories. The readers will thank you for it.
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