“Hi, I have a real problem with dialogue,” said the nervous-looking young woman sitting in front of my desk.

“What's your problem?” I asked.

“My dialogue sucks. It feels really organic, but when my friends read my stories, they always look like they're just skimming through the dialogue. One of them even yawned!”

“It's probably because you're writing your characters' dialogue exactly like in this example. It's lifeless, nothing but talking heads spouting exposition. Do you have any conflicts? Subtext?”

“But isn't dialogue supposed to reflect real life?”

“Not necessarily. Most real-life dialogue is boring and doesn't further our personal goals or storylines, if such a thing even exists in the real world.

'I'll tell you what. Let's go over what makes dialogue amazing right now!”

Example Scene

I'm going to write a quick scene to reference throughout the rest of this. If you want to follow along, go ahead with your own.

Start by creating your scene and thinking about your characters. What are their agendas? What external thing is happening that you need the reader to know?

In my scene, a young man named Billy races through dark alleyways. He's a good guy who, desperate for money, robbed a Best Buy and is trying to quickly sell the tablets he stole. The police, who are actually stopping a man who ran a stop sign, spook him and he flees, leaving the tablets with the fence who was still counting out the cash.

He's panicked, unused to this kind of life, and when he turns the corner and steps onto the sidewalk his brother is there. His brother, whom Billy lives with, was on his way back to their apartment to gather their things. They've been evicted.

Billy's heart was racing, his legs pumping faster than they had since joining the track team in high school. The cops didn't seem to be following him. No shouts to put his hands up or threats to shoot could be heard down the winding alleys he now found himself in.

The light ahead meant the seedy roads he was in were now coming to an end. Slowing, he tossed the ski mask and hunting knife into a dumpster. He couldn't have them on him if the cops really did decide to question him about the stolen tablets. While he was at it, he figured he should ditch his father's oversized sweater too.

His mind anywhere but the present, his body slammed into Jake's the moment he stepped onto the sidewalk.

“Can't you watch where you're going? What were you doing anyway? You're covered in sweat! You're not even wearing a jacket!”

“I went for a run. Running always used to help, back then anyway.” Billy caught his brother's face and fixed on it. His mouth was down-turned in the way it always was whenever he was profusely upset. Minor annoyances he would rant and rave about, but when things got too serious he took on a look that reminded him of a corked bottle that was about to explode. Did he hear of the robbery?

“Too bad you weren't home. You hardly ever leave the house, but the one time I needed you to stay home, I find you here!” his voice was raising and cracking at the same time. “I've been trying to call you for at least fifteen minutes!”

“I'm sorry, okay! Sometimes I need a break!”

“You could have at least brought your phone. It's not like anyone but me calls you anyway.”

Jake was angry and frustrated. Billy's stomach felt knotted up, the dread that Jake suspected him looming over his entire being. He just couldn't have brought his phone, though. It could be traced.

“We've got to get home. Now!” Jake said, grabbing Billy by the arm and turning him down the street as he used to when they were kids and one of Billy's schemes went horribly wrong.

“I don't get it.” However innocent-sounding the lie was, it felt stuck in Billy's throat as he uttered it.

“We have to get our stuff. The landlord won't wait anymore, and what we don't get out in three days is going to be thrown away.”

Dialogue is About Avoiding the Mundane and Demonstrating Your Conflict and Character

Real-life is made up of a lot of filler. This is good for us, as without it our lives would be over very quickly were we only to live long enough for our story to be told without the filler. This is why it doesn't take a lifetime to read someone's biography or to watch a documentary or docudrama about someone – when it comes down to it, our story (legacy) is very short. It doesn't leave much time to smell the roses, play catch with your kid, or walk your dog, does it?

A fictional novel or short story, on the other hand, is similar to that hypothetical biography in that it cuts away most of that filler. I don't want to read about the main character taking a break from the plot to go fishing, for example, unless that fishing trip is going to allow me to see a different, meaningful side to that character or if that fishing trip is going to turn into an event that moves the plot forward.

It sounds cold (and I'm one of the few who actually enjoys filler episodes of TV shows), but that's how most of your readers are going to be. They're invested in your characters, but that doesn't mean they want to watch them fishing all by themselves for no reason other than that's what some people in real life might do when life gets too overwhelming.

Even Harry Potter shows the events it does and lets the readers listen in on the conversations it does for reasons. Even if the plot doesn't seem to be moving in a particular scene, those scenes are establishing moments for the characters.

Dialogue in particular is meant to convey conflict or your characters. Used correctly, you can cut out boring scenes or excessive detail while still helping the reader to understand your characters, setting, or plot.

For example, we don't need to read an entire scene dedicated to Hermione studying to know that she takes school very seriously and dedicates a lot of time to it. The dialogue with her or even between Harry and Ron alone conveys perfectly that this is something Hermione does whether we personally witness it or not.

If your dialogue is, as our fictional struggling writer puts it, “organic” then it might be time to cut away some of it if it's too mundane.

“How are you this morning, Carl?” John asked.

“Oh not too bad,” Carl replied. “I heard Anchorage got hit with some blizzard last night!”

“Yeah, my cousin lives up there and says he's stuck in his driveway until it gets plowed out.”

Yawn! Given the right context, this could be a little more interesting. Maybe our characters have to get to Anchorage for whatever reason and the blizzard is going to block their way. Or perhaps this is a moment of connection between two characters who previously would have nothing to do with each other and you need them to start tolerating each other.

However, if this conversation exists simply because this is what people talk about in real life, however, it needs to go. Anchorage isn't important and neither is John's cousin, at least not to our story. Your reader will run screaming from your story if it's buried under “realistic” moments like this.

So, how do you avoid this trap? How do you really convey relevant information through dialogue without sounding contrived?

We can see here a few things at play in the example scene I wrote. Billy has just committed armed robbery and tried to sell the stolen goods for rent money. Jake has already gotten the news that the pair will be evicted and is heading home to collect their things, or at least what they can carry.

The conflict: Billy has just made what could turn out to be the worst mistake of his life if he's caught. Trapped by his own actions, he cannot under any circumstances let Jake know what he's done.

Jake is frustrated because he's been unable to reach Billy. They're about to get evicted and don't have a lot of time left.

The setting: We can tell just through the dialogue that it's a colder day, as Jake can't believe Billy is sweating and remarks that he's not even wearing a jacket.

The characters: Billy lies about going for a run, mentioning that it used to help. Clearly, Billy was, at least at one time, fairly athletic. We also know from Jake that Billy doesn't leave the house often anymore. Maybe he's grown lazy? Maybe he's having a nervous breakdown and isn't receiving much support? Who knows, but for whatever reason, he prefers to stay in his apartment.

As for Jake, Billy is clearly familiar with his mood swings. We rely a little more on description to tell us about Jake, but the way he speaks to Billy tells us a lot about his character, or at least the way he's dealing with their predicament.

This little scene in a larger hypothetical story is moving things forward. If I did it right, it should capture the reader's attention, not lull them into sleep after reading about Billy pulling off an armed robbery and abandoning the goods. The dialogue serves as an interesting bridge into our characters' next predicament.

One way to make your dialogue even more interesting is to have your characters talk over each other. This is a great way to not only mimic real life (because cutting out the mundane doesn't mean abandoning realism altogether) but also to establish different characters' priorities.

You can also use little lines of dialogue to cut back on description even further. In The Chronicles of Prydain, one of the characters has an enchanted harp. Because the character has aspirations of being a bard, he has a tendency to stretch the truth, or outright lie. His mentor gave him the harp to comically call him out, as its strings snap whenever he stretches the truth too far. Instead of describing the snap every single time this happens, Lloyd Alexander would write little things like “There goes another one!” into the dialogue to let the reader know it had happened again.

Dialogue Should Never be Talking Heads

Another easy trap is to have a page of just dialogue. The opening dialogue for this article is bad. The characters are doing nothing but flapping their jaws, giving us hardly anything to focus on outside of the dialogue. Have your characters do things as they speak, especially if the conversation, while important, isn't the most riveting.

The characters in the example scene I wrote are feeling and doing things. Jake's mouth is down-turned, he grabs Billy's arm and begins to march him straight back home. Billy is feeling a lot of things. He's terrified! Robbing a store is so far out of character for him that it's affecting his entire self.

You see, while good use of dialogue can cut back on description, it cannot cut it out completely. Talking heads are just as boring as a detailed layout of an entire setting so exact that it feels less like telling a story and more like giving a description of a suspect to the cop who's trying to draw his likeness!

Let's rewrite the beginning dialogue to include a little more description.

“Hi, I have a real problem with dialogue.”

I looked up from the manuscript I was reading at the young, petite woman who now sat in front of me, her hands wringing the life out of a Kleenex in her lap.

“It's still the first draft,” I replied. “Plenty of time to work it out.”

“But I don't know how! No matter what, something just feels off. I try and listen to the conversations around me for inspiration, but even my friends never get through any of my finished stories without yawning or skimming.”

That Kleenex was toast, and a little moist. Even now she was stifling back tears.

“Well, there's your biggest problem!” I happily exclaimed. “Your dialogue is dry and giving very little insight into your characters or the story at large. Let me show you how to fix it.”

There, isn't that a little better? This dialogue feels a bit more organic while still pointing out the big problems our amateur writer is having. The extra description gives us a little more insight into the character. Clearly, this is a woman who's been struggling with this dialogue problem for a while and is on the verge of giving up. She's that much more endearing to us now, and most of us could relate to her problem at some point in time.

So, when do you use talking heads? Very rarely. If a scene is particularly fast-paced or intense, cutting down on words is essential, and your dialogue might start reading a little more like the script for a play instead of a novel or short story. These scenes should be short and over with fairly quickly, however, so don't overestimate the amount of time you can use talking heads.

The only other time when you should cut out descriptions in favor of talking heads is in flash fiction. Flash fiction is a story told in under 1,000 words, so if you're aiming for a 400-500 word story, for example, you should cut out as much description as you can while still keeping the story interesting.

Final Tips

Before I abruptly end this article, I'd like to give you a few more tips when writing dialogue. You have the big ones out of the way and are hopefully by now writing dialogue that serves a true function in your story, matters to your characters, and cleverly allows you to cut back on description.

• • Read your dialogue out loud. This will help you tremendously to see how natural your dialogue sounds. Are your sentences too long and your characters can't breathe? Do they sound too modern for your historical drama? Maybe too archaic for your hip and modern reader? Reading it out loud will help you understand where your shortcomings are.

• • Don't use phonetic spelling. I'm not saying you can't write something like, “I reckon we'll just sit tight here. We don't have t' head out for nothin' if Ma's not gonna show today.” I'm saying don't spell out every word in that sentence phonetically. It still has to be readable.

• • Don't let your characters be amazing listeners. If you're like me, you don't enjoy interrupting people while they're talking, even when in the midst of a heated argument. Your fictional characters, on the other hand, shouldn't be great listeners who only break up the stream of dialogue with a head nod or grunt in agreement. They should interrupt and voice their own opinions, needs, and desires, even if they have to cut someone off mid-sentence to do so.

That's all I can tell you about how to write amazing dialogue. If dialogue is something you struggle with, I suggest you go write some practice scenes (not entire stories) and just see how much you can convey with a balanced use of description and speech.