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Writing Better Dialogue: A Craft Guide to Making Your Characters Sound Like Real People
by Writing Workshops Staff
5 years ago
Here is a passage of dialogue:
"Hi, Sarah," said Tom. "How are you doing today?"
"I'm fine, Tom," Sarah said. "I've been thinking a lot about what happened between us last year. I've been replaying it in my mind over and over, and I've come to the conclusion that we both made mistakes, and I think if we could just sit down and talk about it honestly, we could probably work things out."
"I agree with you completely, Sarah," Tom said. "I also think we both made mistakes. Let's talk about it."
If you winced reading that, good. Your instincts are working. But can you name exactly what's wrong with it? Not just "it sounds bad" — but why? What specific craft failures are stacking up in those few lines?
Writing dialogue is one of the hardest things a fiction writer does, and it's hard precisely because it looks easy. We all talk. We all listen. We've been marinating in conversation since before we could read. So it feels like dialogue should come naturally. But the gap between how people actually speak and how characters should speak on the page is where most writers get into trouble. That gap is the craft.
By the end of this guide, you'll be able to diagnose that passage above — and, more importantly, diagnose your own drafts — with the precision of a writer who understands what dialogue is actually supposed to do in fiction.
Dialogue Is Not Conversation
The first thing to understand is that good dialogue only sounds like real speech. It isn't real speech. If you recorded an actual conversation between two people — even an important, emotionally loaded one — and transcribed it word for word, the result would be nearly unreadable. Real talk is full of false starts, fillers, circular repetition, and tangents that go nowhere. We tolerate this in life because we're getting other information simultaneously: body language, tone of voice, shared context, the particular way someone's jaw tightens before they say something they've been rehearsing.
On the page, you have none of that. You have only the words and the white space around them. So dialogue in fiction is a compression of speech — a distillation that keeps the rhythm and texture of how people talk while cutting everything that doesn't serve the scene. Elmore Leonard understood this as well as anyone who ever wrote fiction. His characters sound utterly natural, like you're overhearing them in a diner booth, but every line is doing work. Nothing is wasted. His famous advice — to leave out the parts readers tend to skip — applies to dialogue most of all.
This is the paradox new writers wrestle with: dialogue that's too faithful to real speech sounds wrong on the page, but dialogue that's too polished sounds wrong in a different way. The solution isn't a formula. It's developing an ear — learning to hear the difference between speech that serves the story and speech that's just filling space.
The Problem of the Beautiful Speaker
Go back to that sample passage. Notice how Sarah delivers her feelings in a single, grammatically perfect paragraph. She identifies the problem, analyzes it, proposes a solution, and wraps it up with a bow. In real life, nobody talks like that — not even people who are articulate and emotionally self-aware. People circle the thing they mean. They approach it and retreat. They say one thing while meaning another.
Flannery O'Connor's characters are a masterclass in this. In her story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the grandmother talks constantly, but she's almost never saying what she actually means. Her chatter is a performance — of propriety, of nostalgia, of moral authority she hasn't earned. When she finally says something real to The Misfit at the end, it arrives like a lightning strike precisely because it's so different from everything she's been saying. The power of that moment depends on the dialogue before it being slightly off, slightly performative, slightly dishonest. O'Connor understood that characters don't speak in thesis statements. They speak in evasions, deflections, and half-truths, and the meaning lives in the gap between what they say and what they feel.
When your characters speak in perfectly constructed, emotionally transparent sentences, you haven't just written unrealistic dialogue — you've stolen from yourself. You've given away information that the reader should have to work for. And readers who have to work for the emotional meaning of a scene invest more deeply in it.
When Real Speech Sounds Wrong on the Page
There's an opposite trap, and it's equally common. Some writers, overcorrecting for the "too polished" problem, try to capture every stammer, repetition, and verbal tic of real speech. The result reads like a court transcript — technically accurate and utterly lifeless.
George Saunders has talked about dialogue as a form of choreography. His characters in stories like "Tenth of December" and "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" have wildly distinctive voices — corporate jargon, teenage bravado, middle-aged resignation — but none of them are transcriptions. They're stylized. Saunders finds the essential frequency of a character's speech and amplifies it, cutting the rest. A teenager in a Saunders story doesn't sound exactly like any real teenager, but he sounds more like a teenager than a real teenager does. That's the trick. Fiction doesn't reproduce reality. It concentrates it.
The practical lesson here is simple but hard to execute: when you're drafting dialogue, write it loose and long. Let the characters ramble. Get the rhythm of the scene down. Then go back and cut at least a third of it. Sometimes half. You're looking for the lines that carry weight — the ones that change something in the scene. Everything else is scaffolding, and it needs to come down once the structure is standing.
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Browse Online Workshops →The Missed Scene: When You Narrate What Should Be Spoken
One of the most common and costly mistakes in fiction isn't about how dialogue sounds — it's about where dialogue is absent. Writers sometimes narrate through their most important emotional moments, summarizing confrontations and confessions in a few sentences of exposition rather than putting the characters in a room and letting them talk.
This almost always weakens the scene. Consider the difference between these two approaches to the same moment:
She told him she'd been in love with him since they were teenagers, and he said he felt the same way.
That's narration. It conveys the information, but it has no texture, no tension, no life. Now imagine the same scene rendered as dialogue — the pauses, the false starts, the way she might change the subject twice before finally saying it, the way he might respond with something completely unexpected. The scene becomes an experience instead of a summary.
This is what dramatists mean when they talk about "writing the scene." If two characters are in conflict, if something important is being revealed or decided, if the emotional stakes are high — that's almost always a place for dialogue, not narration. Edward P. Jones does this with devastating subtlety in The Known World. His narrator can cover years in a single sentence, but when a conversation matters — when something is about to change between two people — he slows all the way down and lets the characters speak. The pacing shift itself signals to the reader: pay attention. This is the scene.
The Redundancy Problem: Dialogue and Narration Saying the Same Thing
Related to the missed scene is its mirror image: the scene where both narration and dialogue are doing the same work, and the result is a story that feels like it's explaining itself twice.
Here's how this typically looks in a draft:
Marcus was furious about the promotion. He'd worked for it for three years, and watching it go to someone who'd been at the company for six months felt like a betrayal.
"I can't believe they gave it to Jenkins," Marcus said angrily. "I've worked here for three years. Three years! And they give it to a guy who's been here six months? It's a betrayal, that's what it is."
The narration tells us Marcus is furious and feels betrayed. Then the dialogue tells us exactly the same thing. The reader is given the same information twice — and worse, the dialogue doesn't reveal anything about Marcus as a character because it's just restating what the narrator already explained.
The fix is to decide what each tool is doing. Narration is good at interiority — thought, memory, backstory, physical sensation. Dialogue is good at externality — how a character performs their feelings for an audience, which is always different from how they actually feel. Let narration and dialogue work in counterpoint, not unison. If the narration tells us Marcus is furious, the dialogue could show him being controlled, even polite, which would tell us something far more interesting about who he is.
This is something Denis Johnson does brilliantly in Jesus' Son. The narrator's interior monologue and the dialogue he reports often seem to be happening in different conversations entirely. The gap between them is where the character's confusion, longing, and self-deception live. It's a technique that turns redundancy into resonance — narration and dialogue working in tension rather than harmony.
Giving Each Character a Voiceprint
The last problem with our opening passage is more subtle than the others but just as damaging: Tom and Sarah sound identical. They use the same sentence structures, the same register, the same rhythms. Swap their names and nothing changes. This is a common draft-stage problem, and it's one of the most revealing. When all your characters sound the same, they usually sound like you — or rather, like a flattened, generic version of you, stripped of the specific texture of your actual speech.
Real people have what linguists call an idiolect — a personal fingerprint of vocabulary, rhythm, syntax, and habit. Some people speak in fragments. Some never finish a sentence. Some answer questions with other questions. Some default to humor when uncomfortable. Some quote their mothers. Think about the five people closest to you: if you read a transcript of their speech without names attached, you could probably identify each one within a few sentences. That distinctiveness is what your characters need.
Toni Morrison was exceptional at this. In Song of Solomon, Pilate and Macon Dead occupy the same story, the same family, but their speech patterns come from different worlds. Pilate's language is earthy, rhythmic, rooted in storytelling and oral tradition. Macon's is clipped, transactional, shaped by ambition and acquisition. You feel the class divide, the philosophical divide, the moral divide between them through the way they construct a sentence. Morrison didn't achieve this by giving one character bad grammar and another good grammar — that's the lazy version of voice work. She gave them different relationships to language itself.
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Explore IndieMFA Programs →The Filler Trap: Dialogue That Exists Because Pages Need Words
There's a category of dialogue that isn't wrong in any technical sense — it's grammatically sound, reasonably realistic, and properly attributed. It just doesn't need to exist. Greeting sequences, small talk, characters explaining what the reader can already see. This kind of writing doesn't usually survive the editorial process in published fiction, which is why beginning writers are sometimes surprised by how little of it they find in the books they admire.
Open almost any novel by Rachel Kushner and you'll notice that her characters enter scenes mid-thought, mid-argument, mid-confession. She rarely writes the social preamble. We don't watch her characters say hello and ask about each other's days because those exchanges don't advance the story or reveal character. When her characters speak, they're already inside the conversation that matters.
This is an editing skill as much as a drafting skill. In early drafts, you may need those warm-up exchanges to find your way into a scene. That's fine — even useful. But in revision, you should be asking one question of every line of dialogue: Does this change something? Does it reveal new information, shift the power dynamic, deepen the conflict, or show us something about the character we didn't know? If a line of dialogue doesn't change anything, it's filler. Cut it, and start the scene where the scene actually begins.
Diagnosing the Passage: What We Can See Now
Let's go back to the opening passage with fresh eyes. Here's what's wrong with it, and — more importantly — here's how a writer might revise it:
The greeting exchange ("Hi, Sarah" / "I'm fine, Tom") is pure filler. It establishes nothing. In revision, you'd cut everything before the first line that matters.
Sarah's long speech is the beautiful-speaker problem. She's performing emotional analysis in perfectly composed sentences. A real person in this moment would likely be indirect, contradictory, or painfully understated. What if she said something oblique instead — something that only makes sense if you already know their history?
Tom's response ("I agree with you completely") is both redundant with Sarah's speech and voiceless. He sounds exactly like her. What if Tom processes conflict differently — what if he deflects with humor, or responds to her emotional openness with a practical suggestion, or says something that reveals he hasn't been thinking about this at all?
There's no subtext anywhere in the passage. Everyone says exactly what they mean. But in life — and in the best fiction — people rarely say exactly what they mean. The meaning lives underneath the words, in what's implied, avoided, or denied.
Here's one possible revision:
"I drove past the old apartment last week," Sarah said.
Tom picked up his coffee. "Yeah?"
"They painted it. Yellow, I think. Or maybe more of a — I don't know. Not yellow. More like a warning."
He set the coffee down without drinking from it. "You didn't go in."
"No." She looked at him. "I didn't go in."
This passage has all the same emotional information — two people processing a shared history, considering reconciliation — but it's delivered through indirection, image, and gesture. Sarah doesn't announce her feelings; she approaches them through a detail. Tom doesn't agree with her; he reveals that he's been thinking about this too, through a statement that's technically a question. The scene is doing more work in fewer words, and the reader is doing some of the emotional labor, which is exactly what you want.
Try This: The Dialogue Diagnostic
Pull up a scene from your current project that relies heavily on dialogue. Read through it and mark every line that meets at least one of these criteria: it reveals new information, it shifts the power dynamic between the speakers, it contradicts something the narrator has told us, or it could only be spoken by this specific character (not just any character with the same name). Every unmarked line is a candidate for cutting or rewriting. If more than a third of your dialogue is unmarked, the scene is carrying too much dead weight. Compress, redirect, or cut until every line is earning its place.
The Long Game of Dialogue
Dialogue is the place in fiction where craft and empathy meet. Writing it well requires you to inhabit someone else's way of thinking and speaking — to hear rhythms that aren't your own, to imagine what someone would say when they're angry and trying not to show it, or when they're lying and almost believing it themselves. It's one of the most demanding skills in fiction, and it's also one of the most rewarding. When dialogue is working, the characters seem to exist independently of the writer. They surprise you. They say things you didn't plan. That experience — of your characters becoming more real than your outline — is one of the deepest pleasures of writing fiction.
The craft of dialogue isn't something you master once. It develops over years, across many drafts and many stories, often accelerated by the experience of hearing your work read aloud or workshopped by other writers who can hear the places where a voice goes flat. If the techniques in this guide resonated with you, consider putting them into practice in a community of writers who are working on the same problems you are.
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