5 mistakes you make when writing dialogue
Fair warning: once you learn these, you won't be able to unsee them.
When writing a novel or memoir, you want the reader to become immersed in your world. One of the quickest ways to pull them out of the story is clunky dialogue. We’ve all seen egregious examples; lines that make us roll our eyes and think, “No one would ever say that in real life.” But even dialogue that’s just a little bit stilted can slow the reader down and make them feel less invested.
Here are a few common but easily solvable mistakes I see writers make:
Go easy on the dialogue attributions
Dialogue attributions are phrases that identify who is speaking. When you’re drafting, it can be really tempting to go through your thesaurus and come up with every possible dialogue attribution because, well, “he said”, gets boring. But please don't do this.
The dialogue itself, as well as what's actually happening in the story and in your character's gestures and body language and feelings, will tell you how the character is speaking. In fact, quite often a gesture beat is better than using “he said.” You want to leave out as many of those dialogue attributions as you can and still maintain clarity of who is speaking. But when you do have attributions, they should either be a gesture beat, (”She crossed her arms and glared.” [Then insert dialogue]) or just use “she said”.
Hold yourself back from including phrases like “he hollered”, “they roared”, “she hissed.” 95% of the time in your story, you just need “said.”
Let go of the adverbs
Similarly, you may want to throw some adverbs in there since “they said” can start to feel kind of boring: “He said angrily,” “She said happily,” “He grumbled moodily.” I’m going to be blunt: You never need that. If they're grumbling, it should be clear from the dialogue that they're grumbling.
Don’t…um…
In the real world, lots of people say “um”, “uh”, or pause while speaking. But in written dialogue, there’s usually no need to include that. It can be so tempting to think that you’re capturing exactly how people talk, but it can feel like too much for the reader. You want to show your reader just the highlights reel of each line of dialogue. So all of those “um”s and those pauses, they fall away.
The exception is when you're trying to show that somebody's struggling to find their words because they're startled or upset. In that case, the “um”s have a purpose: to clue the reader in on an emotion.
The three beat rule of dialogue
You do not want an uninterrupted bit of dialogue to be longer than about three phrases. And I'm not talking about three long, compound sentences. I am talking about three phrases.
If a character says, “Yes, sir,” that's one beat, even though it's only two words. You want that dialogue to be as short and as snappy as you can get it, but if you have to go longer than those three beats, then you want to break it up in some way.
Try to put a gesture or an emotional response from the character in the middle to break up those long bits of dialogue. For example, you could end a bit of dialogue like this
“Drink this.” He handed me a glass. “Now go to your quarters.”
You want to avoid getting too “monologue-y.” And that happens when you violated that three beat rule.
As you already know…
Dialogue should be there to move the plot along and to show the dynamics between characters. It should never be there because you have something that you need to tell the reader. A good indicator that you’re doing this is if your sentence starts (or could start) with “As you already know…”
I know you’re thinking, “Julie, the whole point of writing a book is telling the readers something.” You’re right, but dialogue's not the place to spell things out to the reader in a way that wouldn't naturally occur in a conversation.
If my longtime friend and I are talking about our coffee date that we've set up for next week, I wouldn’t say, “As you know, I have a nut allergy, so I won't be able to order any peanut butter cookies with my latte next Thursday when we go to lunch.”
If it’s important that the reader knows about this allergy, what can you do instead? Maybe at the coffee shop, somebody offers me peanuts and I say, “I have a peanut allergy.” Or better yet, because my friend has known me for a long time, she says, “Don't eat that. I saw there's peanuts in it.” That sounds much more natural and reveals more about our dynamic.
Moral of the story: Less is more
You want that dialogue to be short, snappy, to convey something about character and move that plot right along. If I was going to give you one piece of advice about dialogue to write on a sticky note and stick next to your desk, it would be, “Less is more.”
Go in there with a scalpel and cut as many words out as you can because it will increase the pace and tension, and it will keep the reader turning those pages.