How do you write natural sounding dialogue?
Here are two examples of dialogue:
“If I see you again, Mr. Anderson, I promise that the outcome will be far less civil… and you will regret it.”
“Get outta here, Jack. Because next time I see you, I swear, I’m f**king dropping you were I find you.”
Substantively, these are the same threat. If Person A sees Person B again, it will result in an unpleasant altercation. But the first one sounds like it’s out of a Gilded Age historical, or maybe a very formal CEO if it’s contemporary. The second conjures images of someone “lower class” (class stereotypes) because of the slang and the direct threat of violence vs. the implied threat of… well, whatever the first person’s capable of.
Is one more natural than the other?
Technically, no… depending the character speaking.
There is no “universal natural dialogue.”
Dialogue doesn’t exist in a bubble. It’s always in the context of who’s doing the talking. If you are creating well-rounded, nuanced characters, dialogue will be yet another tool to help you bring them to life believably.
How do you do that?
Through word choice, cadence, and tone, all of which are rooted in their backstories and their current life situation.
Who is your character?
This is the best place to start. The more you know your character, the more easily you can tailor their dialogue (and their “inner monologue” if you’re writing deep third or first person POV) to match and even enhance them.
Let’s say you have a character who used to be a mob killer, but is now in a small town, living what seems to be a boring, innocuous life.
They’ve adjusted their persona to match the other inhabitants to a certain extent. Perhaps they’re in the South now, though, and they stand out because they lack a drawl, or because they’re using words that might not pin them specifically to a geographic area – but it’s definitely pegged as Yankee.
They say “soda” instead of “cola.” Their words are rushed, and curt. They have to stop themselves from swearing – something you show.
Then, someone from their past comes back. Suddenly the Jersey or Boston starts to creep out in their voice, for example. It starts out with a few word choices: random Italian slang, or the thick ah in words like cahr. (Do be careful of stereotype, obviously. Use sparingly.)
Or, in an utterly different example, let’s say you’ve got a literal alien-from-another-planet. If you’re trying to illustrate them “learning English” to interact with your “humans” their word choice might be either very rudimentary, or very formal, depending on how and when they learned.
You might not have situations like this, but this hopefully illustrates how to start with character and grow dialogue from there.
However, there IS unnatural or bad dialogue.
“Bad” dialogue is when the author uses it in a contrived way, disembodied from the character.
When this happens, it’s usually a way to try and circumvent “info-dumping.” Unfortunately, it’s still info-dumping, just in dialogue! And it stands out like a bruise.
Using the original first example of Mr. Anderson, there’s a big difference between that initial sentence, and this:
“As you well know, Mr. Anderson, I have hated you for twenty years, since you ran away from wedding my sister and vanished, leaving us impoverished. If I see you again, I will bring the full might of my family’s recovered wealth and hard-won power to bear on you, and you know I can, since I have to assume you remember how we destroyed Lord Fauntleroy. I bid you good day, sir!”
First of all, if someone “well knows” something, or “you remember” is pointed out… people don’t say that. This is author intervention and it’s purely informational, because it would tend to go unsaid. Save that information for somewhere else. Or, if you must, have the character explain it to someone who is unfamiliar with the situation.
As within, so without.
The other stumbling block to natural sounding dialogue is staying consistent. While there can be a certain amount of difference in how characters talk depending on context – for example, how you talk with your family and friends is often very different from how you talk to, say, your boss – if you waver too broadly without explanation, there can be a disconnect. If you want that to be the point of the story, then make it clear. BIPOC writers, especially Black writers, write deeply and authentically about the experience of “code-switching” where it’s crucial to adapt your communication to different environments, but again, it is part of the character and the story… deliberate, not accidental.
Another possible inconsistency: dialogue vs. exposition. Unless you’re writing in omniscient, if a character’s POV scene exposition differs wildly from the way they’re speaking, you create an uneven and unsettling experience for the reader. You want the personalities to match.
Finally, differentiate between characters.
You want to make sure that all of your characters sound individual, even if they are somewhat similar in personality and environment. You especially want to do this in books with more than one point of view, and double-super especially want to be careful if you’ve got multiple first person POVs!
If you stripped out a character’s dialogue tags or any other context, could the reader identify who’s talking or whose scene it is? If not, see what you can do to tweak for uniqueness. You don’t have to make them caricatures. But let’s say you’ve got three men from a baseball team, all with their own first person POVs. They’re from essentially the same area – best friends, maybe even brothers, all from Minnesota. How do you make them sound different?
You can have one never swear, another swear all the time. You could have one use slang, or malapropism. You could have one use baseball metaphors all the time. You could have another sprinkle in Spanish because of his Latina wife. You could have one barely talk at all… so when he does, it’s got impact.
Look at the differences in character, then enhance.
The final and best tool for natural sounding dialogue.
Read everything aloud.
You should “hear” if something sounds natural or not, especially if you put some acting behind it. We’re not looking for Oscar-winning, just something to see if it supports emotional weight and sounds like something an actual human and not a plot device would say.
If you’ve been worried about dialogue, these tips and tricks should get you through.
If you have any questions, feel free to email me or work with me.