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What Makes a Credible Dialogue

Prompt: What makes dialogue sound forced or phony? How do you keep it from sounding flat or boring?

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As there are many ways of making dialogue sound forced or phony, there exist many ways of rescuing it.

To start with, dialogue should imitate real speech. People do not talk in long, fancy sentences and in long blocks, unless they are bores who hog the conversation. Most of the time, people in real life use very short sentences or they repeat a word within a sentence or they pause in the middle and then continue on. All these things can be shown with punctuation and through other means. The idea is, each person is unique in his ways of speech that reflects his education and background.

Where dialogue doesn’t imitate everyday conversation in a story is in its context. Every section of dialogue should highlight, add, and progress the plot. The unnecessary talk that doesn’t involve the main storyline should not be included in a dialogue section. In other words, Chekov’s Gun Rule--Everything that is introduced in a story needs to have a function--applies to dialogue, too.

Then, when every character in the story has the same speech as to the choice of words and sentence structure, you know that the writer is putting his own way of speaking in each character’s mouth; therefore, according to each character’s traits, a specific way of talking should be assigned to him or her. Maybe a character has a way of not completing his sentences with his voice trailing off at the end or he has a specific word or phrase that he keeps uttering.

The speech pattern of a character has to fit the character, too. For example, a straight-shooting character won’t beat around the bush. He’ll be direct with the shortest amount of words and won’t coddle the person he’s speaking to. On the other hand, another less confident character’s speech may be more apologetic, more defensive. If a character changes by the end of a story, that change usually shows up in his way of talking as well.

Writing teachers differ in their opinions on the dialogue tags. Most, nowadays, seem to prefer only the ‘he said-she said’ tags. Speaking for me, I don’t mind reading other tags if they are used sparingly and with a purpose. Then, if only two people of different genders are speaking, there might not be a reason to use tags at all but to let the context of the conversation carry the burden as to who is speaking.

In addition, if dialogue in a scene lingers a long while and the dialogue sections are too long and tiresome, it might be a good idea to convert some of the information in them into narrative action.

Dialogue, in general, helps to progress the story as well as show some of the make-up of a character. When it is not doing either of these things, it should be taken out of the story. In short, the dialogue should have the clarity of purpose inside a scene and within the greater context of the story.