Speech gives life to stories. It breaks up long pages of action and description, it gives us an insight into a character, and it moves the action along. But how do you write effective dialogue that will add depth to your story and not take the reader away from the action?

A few pointers to guide you in the right direction:

Point 1: Keep It Tight
One of the biggest rules when writing with dialogue is: no spare parts. No unnecessary words. Nothing to excess.

That’s true in all writing, of course, but it has a particular acuteness when it comes to dialogue. Dialogue helps the character and the reader. Everything your character says has to have a meaning. It should either help paint a more vivid picture of the person talking (or the one they are talking to or about), or inform the other character (or the reader) of something important, or it should move the plot forward. If it does none of those things then cut it out! Here’s an example of excess chat:

“Good morning, Henry!”
“Good morning, Diana.”
“How are you?” she asked.
“I’m well. How are you?”
“I’m fine, thank you.” She looked up at the blue sky. “Lovely weather we’re having.”

Sometimes you don’t need two pages of dialogue. Sometimes a simple exchange can be part of the narrative. If you want your readers to know an interaction like this has taken place, then simply say – Henry passed Diana in the street and they exchanged pleasantries.

If you want the reader to know that Henry finds Diana insufferably then you can easily sum that up by writing – Henry passed Diana in the street and they exchanged pleasantries. As always she looked up at the sky before commenting on the weather, as if every day that week hadn’t been gloriously sunny. It took ten minutes to get away, by which time his cheeks were aching from all the forced smiling.

No Soliloquies Allowed (Unless You’re Shakespeare)
This rule also applies to big chunks of dialogue. Perhaps your character has a lot to say, but if you present it as one long speech it will feel to the modern reader like they’ve been transported back to Victorian England.

So don’t do it!

Keep it spare. Allow gaps in the communication (intersperse with action and leave plenty unsaid) and let the readers fill in the blanks. It’s like you’re not even giving the readers 100% of what they want. You’re giving them 80% and letting them figure out the rest. Take this example of dialogue, for instance, from Ian Rankin’s fourteenth Rebus crime novel, A Question of Blood. The detective, John Rebus, is phoned up at night by his colleague:

… “Your friend, the one you were visiting that night you bumped into me …” She was on her mobile, sounded like she was outdoors.
“Andy?” he said. ‘Andy Callis?”
“Can you describe him?”
Rebus froze. “What’s happened?”
"Look, it might not be him …”
“Where are you?”
“Describe him for me … that way you’re not headed all the way out here for nothing.”

That’s great isn’t it? Immediate. Vivid. Edgy. Communicative.

Point 2: Watch Those Beats
More often than not, great story moments hinge on character exchanges with dialogue at their heart.  Even very short dialogue can help drive a plot, showing more about your characters and what’s happening than longer descriptions can.

(How come? It’s the thing we just talked about: how very spare dialogue makes the reader work hard to figure out what’s going on, and there’s an intensity of energy released as a result.)

Focus on the way dialogue needs to create its own emotional beats. So that the action of the scene and the dialogue being spoken becomes the one same thing. Dialogue is not [real-life] conversation. … Dialogue [in writing] … must have direction. Each exchange of dialogue must turn the beats of the scene … yet it must sound like talk. This excerpt from Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs is a beautiful example of exactly that.

“The significance of the chrysalis is change. Worm into butterfly, or moth. Billy thinks he wants to change. … You’re very close, Clarice, to the way you’re going to catch him, do you realize that?”

“No, Dr Lecter.”

“Good. Then you won’t mind telling me what happened to you after your father’s death.”

Starling looked at the scarred top of the school desk.

“I don’t imagine the answer’s in your papers, Clarice.”

Here Hannibal holds power, despite being behind bars. He establishes control, and Clarice can’t push back, even as he pushes her. We see her hesitancy, Hannibal’s power. (And in such few words!)

Point 3: Keep It Oblique
If you want to create some terrible dialogue, you’d probably come up with something like this:

“Hey Judy.”
“Hey, Brett.”
“You OK?”
“Yeah, not bad. What do you say? Maybe play some tennis later?”
“Tennis? I’m not sure about that. I think it’s going to rain.”

For short glimpses, this might tick on as good. But not in long run, not for long. And the reason is simple. It was direct, not oblique. So direct dialogue is where person X says something or asks a question, and person Y answers in the most logical, direct way. Oblique dialogue is where people never quite answer each other in a straight way. Where a question doesn’t get a straightforward response. Where random connections are made. Where we never quite know where things are going. Just keep your dialogue not quite joined up. People should drop in random things, go off at tangents, talk in non-sequiturs, respond to an emotional implication not the thing that’s directly on the page – or anything. Just keep it broken. Keep it exciting!

This not only moves the story forward but also says a lot about the character speaking.

Point 4: Reveal Character Dynamics And Emotion
Most writers use dialogue to impart information – it’s a great way of explaining things. But it’s also a perfect (and subtler) tool to describe a character, highlighting their mannerisms and personality. It can also help the reader connect with the character…or hate them.

Let’s take a look here at Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower as another dialogue example. Here we have two characters, when protagonist Charlie, a high school freshman, learns his long-time crush, Sam, may like him back, after all. Here’s how that dialogue goes:

“Okay, Charlie … I’ll make this easy. When that whole thing with Craig was over, what did you think?”

… “Well, I thought a lot of things. But mostly, I thought your being sad was much more important to me than Craig not being your boyfriend anymore. And if it meant that I would never get to think of you that way, as long as you were happy, it was okay.” …

… “I can’t feel that. It’s sweet and everything, but it’s like you’re not even there sometimes. It’s great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn’t need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can’t just sit there and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can’t. You have to do things.”

“Like what?” …

“I don’t know. Like take their hands when the slow song comes up for a change. Or be the one who asks someone for a date.”

The words sound human. Sam and Charlie are tentative, exploratory – and whilst words do the job of ‘turning’ a scene, both receiving new information, driving action on – we also see their dynamic. And so we connect to them. We see Charlie’s reactive nature, checking with Sam what she wants him to do. Sam throws out ideas, but it’s clear she wants him to be doing this thinking, not her, subverting Charlie’s idea of passive selflessness as love.

The dialogue shows us the characters, as clearly as anything else in the whole book. Shows us their differences, their tentativeness, their longing. Understand your characters as fully as you can. The more you can do this, the more naturally you’ll write dialogue that’s right for them. You can get tips on knowing your characters here.

Point 5: Keep Your Dialogue Tags Simple
A dialogue tag is the part that helps us know who is saying what – the he said/she said part of dialogue that helps the reader follow the conversation. Keep it Simple. A lot of writers try to add colour to their writing by showering it with a lot of vigorous dialogue tags. Like this:

“Not so,” she spat.
“I say that it is,” he roared.
“I know a common blackbird when I see it,” she defended.
“Oh. You’re a professional ornithologist now?” he attacked, sarcastically.

That’s pretty feeble dialogue, no matter what. But the biggest part of the problem is simply that the dialogue tags (spat, roared, and so on) are so highly coloured, they take away interest from the dialogue itself – and it’s the words spoken by the characters that ought to capture the reader’s interest. Truth is, in a two-handed dialogue where it’s obvious who’s speaking, you don’t even need the word said.

Get Creative

As an alternative, you can have action and body language demonstrate who is saying what and their emotions behind it. The scene description can say just as much as the dialogue.

Here’s another example of the same exchange:

Joan clenched her jaw. “Not so!”
“I say that it is.”
His voice kept rising with every word he shouted, but Joan was not going to be deterred.
“I know a common blackbird when I see it.”
“Oh. You’re a professional ornithologist now?”

Not one dialogue tag nor adverb was used there, but we still know who said what and how it was delivered. And, if you’re really smart and develop how your characters speak (pacing, words, syntax and speech pattern), a reader can know who is talking simply by how they’re talking.

The simple rule: use dialogue tags as invisibly as you can. I’ve written about a million words of my Fiona Griffiths series, and I doubt if I’ve used words other than say / reply and other very simple tags more than a dozen or so times in the entire series.

Keep it simple!

Point 6: Get The Punctuation Right
Dialogue punctuation is so simple and important, and looks so bad if you get it wrong. Here are a few simple rules to know before your character starts to speak:

• Each new line of dialogue (i.e: each new speaker) needs a new paragraph – even if the dialogue is very short.

• Action sentences within dialogue get their own paragraphs too. The only exception to this rule is if the sentence interrupts an otherwise continuous piece of dialogue. for example: “Yes,” she said. She brushed away a fly that had landed on her cheek. “I do think hippos are the best animals.”

• When you are ending a line of dialogue with he said / she said, the sentence beforehand ends with a comma not a full stop (or period), as in this for example: “Yes,” she said.

• If the line of dialogue ends with a question mark or exclamation mark, you still don’t have a capital letter for he said / she said.  For example: “You like hippos?” he said.

• If the he said / she said lives in the middle of one continuous sentence of dialogue, you need to deploy those commas like a comma-deploying ninja. Like this for example: “If you like hippos,” he said, “then you deserve to be sat on by one.”

• Use the exclamation point sparingly. Otherwise! Your! Book! Is! Going! To! Sound! Very! Hysterical!

Point 7: Accents And Verbal Mannerisms
Realistic dialogue is important, but writing dialogue is not the same as speaking. Remember that the reader’s experience has to be smooth and enjoyable, so even if your character has an accent, speech impediment, or talks excessively…writing it exactly as it’s spoken doesn’t always work.

Accents
If you want to show that your character is from a certain part of the UK, it often helps to add a smattering of colloquial words or,

In The Last Thing To Burn by Will Dean, the antagonist, Len, has an accent (Yorkshire or Lancashire, it’s obvious but never stated). The protagonist is trapped inside this man’s home, she has no idea where she is, but by describing the endless fields and hearing his subtle accent the reader knows exactly where in the UK she’s trapped.

Len says things like:

‘Going to go feed pigs’ and ‘There’s a good lass.’

You can highlight location, a character’s age, and their social standing simply by giving a nod to their accent.

On the flip-side, if they have a foreign accent, it can sometimes be too jarring to write dialogue exactly as it sounds.

‘Amma gonna eata the pizza’ is an awful way to write an Italian accent – it’s verging on racist. Try to avoid that. Instead, simply mention they have an Italian accent and let the reader fill in the blanks.

Accents Written Well
But, of course, there’s always an exception!

Irvine Welsh writes English in his native Scottish dialect and it’s exemplary – but nothing something we would recommend for a novice writer.

Here’s an excerpt from Trainspotting:

Third time lucky.  It wis like Sick Boy telt us: you’ve got tae know what it’s like tae try tae come off it before ye can actually dae it.  You can only learn through failure, and what ye learn is the importance ay preparation.  He could be right.  Anywey, this time ah’ve prepared.

Perhaps, if you have a Scottish character in your novel you may want them to speak in a strong accent. But getting it wrong can ruin an entire novel, so unless you are very skilled and very confident, stick to the odd colloquialism or word and leave it there.

Verbal Mannerisms
Whether you realise it or not, we all have speech patterns. Some of us speak slowly, others pause, people also trail off mid-sentence. Some people also use verbal mannerisms, such as adding a word to a sentence that is unnecessary but becomes a personal tic (such as ‘man’, ‘like’ or ‘innit’). Or repeat favourite words. These can be influenced by age, background, class, and the period in which the book is set.

Here’s an example of two people talking. See if you can guess their ages.

“Chill, Bro.”

“Chill? I’m far from chilled, you scoundrel. That’s my flower bed you’ve just dug up.”

“I found something, though. It was sticking out the ground.”

“Outrageous behaviour. So… You… One simply can’t go around digging up people’s gardens!”

“Yeah. And what?” They both stared down at the swollen white lumps pressing out of the soil like plump snowdrops.”What is it, though?”

Harold swallowed. “Fingers.”

Lastly,

• Keep speeches short. If a speech runs for more than three sentences or so, it (usually) risks being too long. Break it up with some action or someone else talking.

• Ensure characters speak in their own voice. And make sure your characters don’t sound the same as each other. Remember mannerisms, speech patterns, and how age and background influences speech.

• Add intrigue. Add slang and banter. Lace character chats with foreshadowing. You needn’t be writing a thriller to do this.

• Get in late and out early. Don’t bother with small talk. Decide the point of each interaction, begin with it as late as possible, ending as soon as your point is made.

• Interruption is good. So are characters pursuing their own thought processes and not quite engaging with the other.