Dialogue is one of the most interesting, and challenging, aspects of writing a novel, short story or even some forms of non-fiction. Getting your characters to speak for and of themselves enlivens your writing, and can break up your prose. It gives the reader a chance to have the magical illusion that they are listening to the characters themselves speak rather than having all of the events of the story filtered through you, the writer. Dialogue is also one of the easiest aspects of your writing to improve with just a few simple principles. So, here are some guidelines for improving your dialogue.

Presentation
I know, first up with the boring part. But getting dialogue right on the page is important. When you get it wrong, as with many other aspects of grammar and proofreading, what your reader notices is not the witticisms of your characters, or the thrill of the scene, but how it’s set out. The thing about a well-presented manuscript is that the mechanics of the writing should seem invisible to the reader: they should be so ‘right’ that they remain unnoticed. Of course, you may want to experiment with the presentation for some reason, but it’s always good to know what the reader is expecting, so that when you do ‘break’ the rules, you know why you’re doing so, and what effects it might produce for the reader. So, here are the basic rules for presenting dialogue.

1. In dialogue, each new speaker or speech event is contained in a new paragraph. These paragraphs should be
indicated in the same way as other paragraph breaks in your work, by a double return, or by an indented first
line. A common error we see again and again in manuscripts is to format your dialogue paragraphs differently
to your prose paragraphs.

2. A basic piece of dialogue is puncuated thus:

“I have eaten your plums,” she said.

3. A basic question (or exclamation):

“Why did you eat my plums?” he said.

4. An interrupted speech that is otherwise a single sentence:

“Because,” he said, “they were there.”

5. An interrupted speech that is two separate sentences:

“Next time just ask,” she said. “I would love to share my plums with you.”

6. A piece of speech that is interrupted abruptly:

“But when will we-” he said.

7. A piece of speech that tails off without being completed:

“Perhaps if you ...” she said.

Verbs and adverbs
You should aim to use apt, strong verbs in almost every area of your writing. Looking for the perfect verb, rather than the first one you think of, can help to enliven and strengthen your writing. It’s almost become a truism that you should delete adverbs from your work wherever possible. The thing to consider in doing so is why you thought you needed the adverb in the first place. Usually it’s because you either chose a weak or inappropriate verb, or because you didn’t trust your verbs to do their work. It’s not necessary, for example, to say that someone ‘skipped merrily’ – skipping is always a merry activity. This principle shifts a little when it comes to dialogue, and the old verb ‘said’. Said, like ‘the’ or ‘and’ is almost an invisible word. This is a good thing: when your dialogue is pitch perfect, you don’t want the writing to get in the way. You want the reader to focus on what’s said. You don’t want the emphasis to be on the writing (and the writer), but on the dialogue and the charcter. So, almost always, you should use the simple construction ‘he/she said’ to tag your dialogue. No fancy verbs. No adverbs. If you feel you need to describe the speech, then a better tactic for improving the writing than adding elaborate verbs (or adverbs) after the dialogue is to re-examine the dialogue itself first, and then to look at the use of effective beats to moderate and modulate the interaction.

There is, however, one crucial exception to this rule. And it’s best demonstrated, I think, by an example:

‘I love you,’ she lied.

Here, the verb ‘said’ has been replaced by one of its many synonyms ‘lied’. In this instance, the verb is necessary and wonderful subtle. It creates a kind of dramatic irony in which the character who speaks and the reader know something that
the character being spoken to does not. This ironic gap between the character’s knowledge and that of the reader creates a wonderful opportunity for creating tension. Imagine, here, if the person being spoken to (let’s call them E) hears this.
They’re thrilled. They tell all their friends they’re in love. They start making plan to move interstate to be with the speaker. They buy extravagant gifts for the speaker. Tickets for the theatre, tickets for a trip to Europe together. All the time, the reader
is cringing, waiting for them to find out about the lie.

So, a good rule of thumb with dialogue is never to use anything other than ‘she said’ to describe a speech act, except where the content of the speech is completely at odds with the subtext and is not revealed through some other means in the text.
A word on adverbs. Adverbs are cheap ways to dramatise your writing. I like to think of the kind of really good, spare writing that eschews unnecessary adverbs as being sculptural. A good sculpture emphasises and works with what is left out: it
emphasises simplicity rather than excessive complexity. It emphasises the one perfect colour or shape, rather than a hodge podge of almost-good-enough ones. Similarly, when it comes to verbs and adverbs, less is often more. In the simple entence:
He ran quickly, for example, the adverb ‘quickly’ doesn’t really add anything to the sentence. And yet ‘He ran’ is not precise enough on its own. What other verbs could you substitute for ‘ran’ that would give the reader a clearer picture, rather
than a more wordy, but no less precise one?

He tumbled.
He raced.
He hurtled.
He flew.

None of these are perfect, perhaps, especially when looked at in isolation from a context, but I hope you can see that almost any of them are preferable to ‘He ran quickly’, because instead of using a not-quite-right verb and a ‘hollow’ adverb, they use a concrete and specific verb that gives not just action, but some imaginary, almost metaphoric sense of the nature of ‘his’ movement.

Tics
There are several things that appear over and over again in dialogue that you can easily cut to make your writing seem sharper and more engaging. Too often, all of your characters in the first drafts will say something like ‘Oh’ or ‘Well’ at the beginning of everything they say:

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t know where the children are today.’
‘Well, maybe you could look for them.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘Well, why not?’

This is exagerrated for effect, of course, but you can see what I mean. I suspect that often what happens is that while writing, these ‘ohs’ and ‘wells’ help us begin a line even when we’re not yet sure what the character is going to say. It’s a bit like those famous ‘white box’ stories written by beginning writers. You know the kind: I woke up; I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing there, etc etc. This is often a kind of unconscious code for the writer’s process: I sat down at the desk and opened a blank file: I didn’t know who I was writing about or where they were. I smoked a cigarette (and so did they) made a cup of coffee (and so did they). This can go on for pages before the real writing, and the real story, kicks in. I think it’s best to cut all that unconscious prewriting and leave the actual story on the page; not the history of its evolution.
Doing away with all those ‘ohs’ and ‘wells’ - or whatever your version of them is - will quickly improve your dialogue, notice how even the banal exchange above reads better without them:

‘I don’t know where the children are today,’ she said.
‘You could look for them.’
‘I don’t know..’
‘Why not?’

Beats
Beats are moments of prose used, around dialogue, to indicate what the characters are doing during a conversation, and to prevent them from being simply ‘talking heads’. It is also used to pace dialogue in more seemingly natural ways than writing: he paused; he waited; or, they were silent for a while. While each of these is ok – they’re workmanlike and practical beats - they’re a bit flat, and over the course of a novel, or even a longish short story, then can easily start to overpopulate your story. They’re also missed opportunities to reveal your characters and their situation by showing them: writing about what they’re thinking, wearing, doing or not doing are much more evocative and engaging beats than simply saying: they waited.
Beats can be great ways to reveal the undercurrent of your dialogue: they can reveal how the characters feel about what they are saying, or hearing, without you telling the reader. A lazy, first-draft style dialogic beat might say something like:

‘I think we’re lost,’ she said, looking around in a confused way.

Whereas a slightly more effective, more developed, version could be:

‘I think we’re lost,’ she said, eyeing at the streetmap still folded, untouched, in the side pocket of Harold’s
backpack.

Effective and interesting beats can be, in other words, a great opportunity to ‘show’ your characters and particularise
their situation, rather than falling for the trap of using them to explain to the reader what the dialogue alreadyshows. Too often, I see dialogue beats that are being used by the nervous, first-draft writer to shore up dialogue by first showing what the character says (I hate you) and then telling the reader what the dialogue means, or over-emphasising an already
clear statement (she shouted, glaring at her mother resentfully).

It’s also a good idea to examine your work closely, or ask a good reader to, and identify your own personal ‘tics’ when it comes to writing beats. Sometimes you can go too far with beats: writing dialogue scenes in which your characters are
constantly looking away and then at the person they’re talking to, ‘glancing’ at their watch, adjusting their clothes/glasses, tapping their fingers or whatever your personal (unconscious) favourite is. The point is not that any of these things are
inherently bad things to use as beats, but that you don’t want to overuse any one of them to the point where your dialogue is constantly slowed down by overuse of beats, particularly the same kind of beat, so that your charactes start to seem really
twitchy all the time. As if they have a kind of dialogic Tourette’s. As with any good writing a useful principle to keep in mind is that any sentence, or phrase, should be doing more than one thing at a time: advancing character, scene, costume, period, or theme, revealing plot, managing pace, etc. If it’s just doing one thing (marking a bit of time while your characters stare each other out) then it’s a lazy sentence that’s not earning its keep.

So, here’s a bit of pretty ordinary dialogue – not awful, but not doing very much:

‘Where is the bus?’ she asked, looking down the street.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered, glancing at his watch.
She looked at him, and pulled her bag up onto her shoulder. ‘Do you think
we have time for a cigarette?’ she said.
‘I’m not sure,’ he shrugged. ‘But maybe if we light one the bus will come.’

Here, each of the beats are pretty flat and obvious: they don’t tell us much about the characters, the place or the greater context of the story. There’s no thematic or period detail. No sense of genre or tension. Try rewriting this scene to reveal, through more precise and imaginative use of the beats that reveal or are related to the greater context of the situation:

The girl hates the guy, but the guy thinks the girl likes him, or

• It’s taking place in 1940s Britain, or
• They’re brother and sister, but don’t know they’re brother and sister, or
• He was given up for adoption as a child, by the woman, but she doesn’t yet know this is her long-lost son, or
• She’s a policewoman and he’s the murderer she’s been looking for for twenty years, or
• She’s a ghost, or a vampire, or a werewolf, or
• They’ve just come from the registry, where they got married, or
• They’ve just come from signing their divorce papers...
  

Once you’ve had a go at one version of the exchange, try writing this same halfscene for a range of different scenarios, working around the edges of the dialogue to subtly expose aspects of the backstory, character, scene and/or theme. Don’t feel you have to get everything in, of course, but think about how even this kind of banal exchange can be an opportunity, in the context of a larger work, to nuance images, themes and so on.

Leaving things out
A good way to write tight and fast-moving but engaging prose, and to indicate the intimacy of your characters, or their perceptions of each other, is to work with what remains unsaid in a piece of dialogue. The unsaid – the underneath of the Hemingway-esque writer’s iceberg – is the real meat of almost any piece of writing. In dialogue, one way to think about this is to consider when it’s possible for your characters to move past simply answering questions that have been put to them. Consider the small exchange below:

‘Where have you been?’ she said.
‘I haven’t been drinking.’ He moved quickly past her to kiss the top of his son’s head.
‘It’s almost dinnertime. Your mother called twice already.’
He picked up the child and swung him onto his hip. ‘How about a game of cricket before bathtime?
Eh?’
‘Harold. Please.’

Notice here that in the first little exchange, the woman asks a question that Harold ignores: he instead answers the subtext: the question she’s really asking. Then the woman makes a kind of accusation, but it’s a statement: there’s no room for him to argue with it, but she’s clearly seeking more from him. Again, he kind of passively ignores her, focusing on the child to defer attention from himself, and in the process (perhaps) subtly rebuking her for ‘starting a fight’ in front of the child.

This piece of dialogue demonstrates, too, a kind of narratively-shaped tension you can achieve by having two characters in a conversation where it’s clear (to you as the writer at least) what each of them wants. In this instance the characters want different things from this exchange: the woman wants Harold to fess up to where he’s been, perhaps to apologise. She wants to confront him. The man wants to avoid any confrontation, and smooth over the question of where he’s been, why he’s late, or whether he’s been drinking. At least for now. Because their short-term goals are at odds, their dialogue is infused with tension. But – for the writer – knowing their different goals helps you direct what they say and do. Everything she says is directed at her goals, while what he says and does is directed at his.

Consider that every time two or more characters are engaged in dialogue they both have a conversational goal: sometimes they’re the same goal, sometimes they are in direct conflict, sometimes there’s some overlap and some difference. Knowing what these goals are can help you decide: what your characters will say, what they won’t say, and what they’ll avoid saying. It can help you shape the small ‘half-scene’ of a dialogic exchange so that it has energy and spark, rather than being flat and prosaic.

In the end, however, these are good guidelines for editing your dialogue: for sharpening up the work you’ve already done in exploring your character’s inner and outer worlds in order to put their words on the page. That’s the real trick: getting those strangers to speak to you, and getting what they have to say down on the page. Worrying about getting it right while you’re
writing that early draft, however, can really cramp your writing. Perhaps even turn off the magical tap. Writing guidelines and rules like these are, I strongly believe, better editing tools than they are writing tools. They are there to help you fix your dialogue, not write those first few fragile sentences.

***

issue 08:10 | archives by category | archives by author