How to write dialogue that sounds real but stays short

1 The bottom line

Good dialogue is distilled speech: short, charged with what is left unsaid, and unmistakably one character's. Real talk is shapeless, so a transcript bores readers while a trimmed, shaped version feels real.

2 Key takeaways

• Write an illusion of speech, not a transcript. Real talk is incoherent and would put a reader to sleep.
  • Harlan Coben36:23 says a taped coffee shop conversation, played back, would put you to sleep in four minutes.
• Give every line a job, and cut the lines that only deliver exposition. Dialogue should move the story or reveal character, and nothing else earns its space.
  • David Baldacci14:12 now tries to write in 10 words what he used to write in 100.
  • On their first film, Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar56:21 shrank a long truck scene to one line and some looks, and found it far better.
• Put the feeling under the words. People rarely state the real issue, and readers enjoy finding it.
  • Eric Roth17:42 cites the judge in High Noon, who talks about a case in Athens instead of his own situation.
• Give each speaker a rhythm and vocabulary only they have. A reader should know who is talking without a tag.
  • Jodi Picoult32:41 kept five narrative voices in her first novel and eight in A Spark of Light.
• Say it aloud before you trust it. Your ear catches false lines that your eye forgives.
  • Andrew Stanton19:32 cites Tom Hanks coming in to voice Woody as the kind of test a line must pass.
  • Anne Lamott20:45 says weak dialogue is the main reason she will not buy a book after three pages.

It has to be authentic but not realistic

Harlan Coben, Tell No One, The Stranger, I Will Find You

2.1 Gather real speech, then shape it

Collect how people really talk, then build an illusion of it, because a transcript fails on the page.

• Listen to real talk and keep what you hear. Francine Prose50:55 calls eavesdropping the best way to learn dialogue.
  • Listen to how people talk and the stories they tell each other, and you walk away with pieces of dialogue people have written for you.
  • Steven Levitan57:27 wrote much of Modern Family by writing down what family members actually said.
  • Lines from his own kids' arguments at the kitchen table went straight into scripts Levitan57:27.
  • Prose misses subway rides since moving to the country, and says that writing dialogue makes you listen to people.
• Do not transcribe it. Real speech is too loose to read.
  • Lee Child38:50 says real conversation is incoherent, stop-start and full of placeholders, so natural-looking dialogue is actually very structured.
  • Ava Huang9:52 says three days of transcribed conversation would make bad novel material, so good dialogue distills the essence.
  • Nat Eliason44:40 puts real conversation at about 80% small talk and tangents, which fiction can't afford.
  • Richard Powers1:07:24 says a transcript of people talking on the back of a bus would be chaotic and incoherent.
• Draft as discovery first. Cutting comes on the next pass.
  • Jack Carr58:46 gives a little background, then dives into a conversation with no set goal, writing what he would find interesting.
  • He gets it all down, then rereads and removes repeated points already made a few sentences or a page earlier Carr58:46.
  • Lamott20:45 says to write a ton of dialogue and take most of it out.
• Aim for truthful, not factual. Rob Henderson46:21 says nobody remembers word for word what was said even last week, so the goal is fidelity to the spirit of the exchange.
  • He rebuilt his talks with his therapist by remembering how a 10-year-old and a 40-something adult each spoke.
  • In one line he says sad, then switches to tragic, because he wanted to look mature, and the punctuation shows his hesitations against her cleaner speech.
  • When readers call dialogue real, they mean it plays by the fiction conventions they know. Powers1:07:24 cites Don DeLillo's artificial but true-sounding dialogue in White Noise.

2.2 Give every line a job

Dialogue that only hands the reader facts is exposition in costume, so cut it or move it.

• Never let dialogue be exposition dressed up as conversation. Prose18:59 says the worst dialogue is characters telling each other what they both already know.
  • The best dialogue is someone saying something unexpected, and people speak out of who they are.
  • Her bad sample is a character asking whether it's true that you live in the West Village, which is information pretending to be exchanged.
  • Roth17:42 calls two brothers swapping facts they both know the weak alternative.
• Tie each line to a want and an obstacle. Eliason44:40 says that in each scene a character wants something and something blocks them, so the dialogue should relate to that.
  • Adversarial tension helps: someone pushing and someone refusing, rather than two people agreeing.
  • He ties this to Aaron Sorkin's line that every scene is about intention and obstacle.
• Let a line carry information the reader needs. As a crime reporter, Michael Connelly42:19 could quote a detective only if the quote held information the story had not already given.
  • He still applies that rule in novels with unlimited space, and calls dialogue that carries no meaning fluff.
  • Coben40:21 says the best dialogue has urgency, though it can be quiet.
  • His example is one person telling another they lost their parents young. Then say it in as few words as possible, going back and forth Coben40:21.
• Report speech instead of staging every line. Andrew Sean Greer6:59 says TV teaches us to write people entering, saying everything, and leaving.
  • A novel can summarize speech ('I told her exactly what she needed to hear') or withhold it entirely.
  • Baldacci14:12 calls lengthy dialogue lazy writing, because it puts into speech what action or interior monologue should carry.
  • Greer admires Beryl Bainbridge ending a chapter with the narrator's mother saying what she always.

2.3 Move the feeling into subtext

Let characters talk about one thing while meaning another, and trust the reader to catch it.

• Have the character talk about something else. Roth17:42 says great writers say the issue through a metaphor or a side story.
  • Have a character describe a dream instead of announcing that he is upset with his mother.
  • You get the information, a layer of meaning and often a surprise, as long as you avoid pretension.
• Build conflict without naming it. Connelly44:12 writes conversations that on the face are about this but are really about that.
  • In a scene, friends tell Bosch, fresh from knee surgery in his 70s, to slow down. They sound excited for him but drop in a few words that show their concern.
  • Editors push for more explanation, and he resists.
• Let characters answer sideways. Prose19:45 says dialogue doesn't have to be ping pong where A speaks and B answers.
  • B may say something unrelated and seem not to have heard. Several lines later it turns out B heard everything and couldn't respond at the time.
  • She says this happens in life all the time and gives dialogue its subtext.
• Answer with something other than yes or no. Eliason45:45 says that when one character makes a request, the reader instantly predicts yes or no.
  • Surprise them with a response that opens a new question, like 'we already booked two hours'.
  • Or answer without words: the other person stands up and leaves, which hooks the reader more than a spoken no.
  • When people are angry, they use simple words and repeat the charged ones. Child41:45 uses a woman on a train saying 'I need my money, I lost my money', so emphasis falls on 'need' and 'lost' without markup.

2.4 Make each speaker sound like only them

Build each voice from rhythm, sentence structure and word choice, never from spelling tricks or tags.

• Catch each speaker's rhythm. Dean Koontz39:50 says you must catch how each person constructs sentences and where they are from.
  • His test: a page of two characters talking should reveal who they are by how they sound.
  • Picoult32:41 works on how each character's language runs: one more florid, another plain subject-verb-object.
  • A reader should know who is speaking from one sentence Picoult32:41.
• Show dialect through structure and word choice, not phonetic spelling. Koontz23:05 says you don't fake the accent, because it always sounds funny.
  • For a backwoods crime boss in a Jane Hawk novel, he built the voice from sentence structure and word choice.
  • He says it was some of the most fun he has had writing dialogue, and it brought a huge amount of reader mail.
• Swap the line into another character's mouth. Michael Jamin1:00:05 says that if a line could come from any character, it is not a great line.
  • The best lines carry the context of one character and could only come from them.
  • Pitch the line aloud in the character's voice to check it sounds right Jamin19:12.
  • Jamin admits writers sometimes hand a line to a quiet character anyway, but it stays merely fine.
  • He once did this to Mark Maron's face and spotted that Maron says 'engage' constantly, though Maron denied it Jamin19:12.
• Use only 'said', and let rhythm name the speaker. Lamott21:14 says swapping in chuckled, enthused or proclaimed feels artificial and sophomoric.
  • Put strong verbs in the action around the talk, such as what hands or mouths do, with no adverbs.
  • Readers should know who is speaking from rhythm and vocabulary, not from tags Lamott20:45.

2.5 Read it aloud, then cut

Hear every line in a voice, then trim until each one earns its place.

• Hear it before you keep it. Lamott20:45 says to read dialogue aloud or record it as a voice memo.
  • You will cringe at lines that ring false, like someone who had time to rewrite their sentences.
  • Powers1:08:59 says readers subvocalize, so say it aloud to check register, tone, cadence and the socioeconomic accuracy of the speaker.
  • Stanton19:32 fears a really good actor saying a line out loud, because you can tell right away whether that character would say it.
  • Hearing an actor also shows you idioms and quirks you can use Stanton19:32.
• Cut it in half almost as soon as you write it. Connelly41:30 says writers go wrong by writing dialogue that does not sound real.
  • Real talk in a book is denser than talk at a coffee shop, so trimming is what makes it feel real.
  • He learned this in 14 years of newspaper work, where a crime story got about six inches.
• Reduce a scene to the one line that does the work. Baldacci14:12 says one line of dialogue can do the work of 10.
  • On a film set, a storm wiped out two shooting days. He wrote a long scene, cut it to one line, and let an Academy Award-winning actress carry it.
  • A character who says little, like Amos Decker, makes every line count.
  • Bentley and Kwedar56:21 were told by a screenwriter mentor to treat dialogue as the last tool they reach for. Ask what the least is that you can say while giving the audience the most.
• Let a look replace the words when an actor can carry it. Roth1:03:15 wrote a page and a half monologue for The Insider that he thought was good.
  • On the morning of the shoot, Al Pacino said he could do it with one look. They shot it both ways, and the film used the look.
  • Roth concluded that he sometimes goes overboard describing things and that actors can make lines their own.
• Ask if you would want to overhear it. Coben36:23 asks whether it is a conversation he would want to overhear at a pub.
  • If not, he ups it: short lines, characters going back and forth, and humor to make them likable.

2.6 Where writers disagree

How long and how close to real speech dialogue should run depends on the kind of writing.

• Long runs versus short lines. Wright Thompson40:12 says long runs of dialogue are magic and move the reader faster than narration.
  • That speed depends on reporting deep enough to get people to tell you things on the record in detail.
  • He points to his Jordan piece, where the code names given by the security team are revealed in a quick exchange.
  • Fiction writers like Baldacci14:12 and Connelly41:30 cut hard. Real quotes you earned in reporting can run longer, as long as every exchange moves.
• Copy real talk versus distill it. Levitan57:27 first asks whether people are talking the way people talk, and trusts that the mundane is relatable.
  • Huang9:52 says authors differ: some stylize speech, some make it feel natural, and some keep it sparse.
  • She cites Woody Allen and The Lobster as stylized, and Sally Rooney as dialogue that feels shockingly real Huang9:52.
• Planned lines versus found lines. Bentley33:05 wants no difference in feeling between what was written years earlier and what was made up on the day.
  • When a line felt awkward, they asked the real pilot what she would say, and used hers.
  • Her line 'you better hold on to something' was hers, and audiences latched onto it as a theme.