This has become a growing concern of mine. I already went through the sticky thread on dialogue, god knows a long way back, but that was more on the critique of the grammar. How exactly can you keep dialogue from becoming stale without relying too heavily on:

1. Tags – “Yeah, right,” he said/she said (variations of said).
2. Superfluous tags – “Alas, there is but a simple truth,” Dumbledore said knowingly, with a knowingly knowing gleam in his sharp azure orbs, partially veiled beneath a steel-wire frame glasses.
3. Beats – He glared. He shook his head. He nodded along.

Understandably, you would use dialogue itself to differentiate characters. It would be easier to distinguish a character's voice if there were just two people talking, but what if there was a larger group conversing? A group that isn’t really that diverse, where their voices sort of blend into one another?

I get that variation is key, and given how short this example is, it may look fine. But what if the scene drags on, or if there are more of such scenes in a given chapter, and you kind of repeat the same beats, tags, etc.? It will feel absolutely shoddy.

Any advice?

(Aside from a dialogue profile, which I plan to start on soon)

 

Good question. This is something I think about quite a lot too. My two cents (and purely subjective stylistic preference) below:

1. Go through it with a fine-toothed comb and cut/refine any redundancies.

The dialogue is like the meat of your scene, and the tags are there to dress it up. If they clutter up the picture you're trying to paint, then they're not being very effective. Ideally, what you want is for character voices to carry over without excessive descriptions.


2. Add nuance.

No one wants to read about people sitting around and just talking. Have things happening in the peripheral; add movement, tensions, and internal thoughts -- use these to create the necessary pauses between dialogue instead of relying on too many stock phrases (he nodded, she glared, etc) that don’t really enhance the quality of the scene.

Basically, look for different ways to conceptualize scenes that would otherwise be boring.

3. Read your scene out loud for flow.

This is something I've always done and it's helped me out a lot with figuring what needs to be cut/augmented and where. Conversations should have a certain rhythm as well as aesthetic appeal.

So yeah, worth a shot maybe?

4. Read authors with styles you like.

This is a big one. Pay attention to how they handle streams of dialogue. I've always liked authors that take a minimalist approach, because I think it makes dialogue a lot more meaningful. I also like my dialogue to be very focused, which I think helps curb stock phrase reliance (Like, if you have ten lines of dialogue to worry about instead of twenty, you’ll spend a lot more time spit shining them and making them perfect/special/unique).


That’s all I have for now. Hope some of that was useful.

 

Here are a couple things I think it's helpful to pay attention to, in no particular order.

1. Listen to good audiobooks. There are ways to get better at writing dialogue in the purely mechanical sense, but you also kind of need an ear for it. Hear it, then go into the actual book and see how it's presented on the page. How it looks. The spacing of it, the structure. Good dialogue has a kind of improvisational rhythm - it doesn't actually mimic real-life conversation with all its stops and starts and dead-ends, but it has a bit of that, eh, roughness?

Example: if you just visually scan a page of your writing, and the dialogue is all neatly spaced, back and forth, a character with a short paragraph, then the other character with a short paragraph back - you have a problem, most likely.

2. Along the same lines, the classic problem of dialogue is that you're trying to make it sound real that there are two people talking, and you're only one person in your head. I mean, kind of an obvious thing, but... kind of powerful, too? You really have to compartmentalize. What I do is talk out loud, having both sides of the conversation myself, if I'm blocked. Even if I'm not stuck, it's pretty common that I kind of mentally picture the two people talking, like I'm an invisible third party watching and I just see what they say and write it down.

Huh. That sounds kind of insane actually.

It's not... really... a conscious thing? I just do it. That's the benefit of practice. You kind of internalize these tools until you just do them without thinking.

3. I think it's important to let dialogue define your characters, and to really use it to do a lot of the heavy lifting. By that, I mean let's say you have a character whose personality is a bit nervous. You want to avoid telling the reader that's she's a nervous person outright - so make her dialogue sound nervous. Put yourself in that mindset and think about people you've heard be nervous. Not obvious, like she's literally stuttering or tripping over words, but just... the way she talks. Nervousness can come out like this waterfall of words, or it can be clipped and choppy. Be specific. It gives your dialogue focus - not only are you thinking, "okay, what does this piece of dialogue say about the plot?", you're also paying attention to what the reader is going to think about the character from the way they say things.

Not only will your dialogue sound better, you'll be amazed at the kind of freedom and leeway you have to do some real work when your non-dialogue prose doesn't keep having to describe and define your characters.

Good dialogue will tell you everything you need to know about a character. Are they educated? Aloof? Smarmy? Do they have someplace to be? Know the character, put those things into the words they speak, and the reader will feel that without you having to tell them that, and your writing will jump, immediately, like three or four levels.

4. Specific, mechanical tips, I'll just rattle off: make an effort to avoid adverbs anywhere near dialogue, then go and remove 90% of them when you edit. Dialogue adverbs suck, yadda yadda yadda. If you're good, you can actually make the occasional adverb really work as a beat, but that's one of those "you have to know the rules until you can break them" things. Echoing Sesc, use "said," always. It's not repetitive; the eye just skips over it and it becomes almost like the quotation marks themselves - just a signal to the brain that talking is happening. Same rules apply about exceptions.

Use punctuation to indicate where the pauses in speech are. Pauses are good, they're the building blocks of conversational rhythm. A comma is a short pause, a soft one. A period is a break, an ending, not even a pause. A dash is a hard pause, but still a pause, unless it's at the end of a line of dialogue, then it's "being cut off," usually. Sometimes it's kind of a swerve or a hip-fake. An ellipsis trails off, or wanders. A semicolon connects things and has a very specific "sound," almost like a dip. Italics can emphasize a word, like a stressed syllable. (Be careful not to overuse this one, although this is more of a "do as I say, not as I do," thing, heh.)

Strict grammar can be a bit more free-form in dialogue. People talk like people talk. Complete sentences are well and good, but a lot of real life conversation doesn't happen in complete sentences. Don't overdo it, but don't be afraid to have dialogue be a bit... messy? Organic?

Incremental repetition is actually a very powerful tool for dialogue, but that's kind of beyond the scope of this post, which is already holy fuck how long is this?

Yikes. Uh... parting words.

Generally you get better at writing dialogue by writing lots of dialogue, by reading lots of dialogue, and by listening to how people talk and being kind of a conversational historian or pack rat, storing away phrases and idioms and accents and quirks. Find a piece of fiction you really like and actually study the dialogue. Pick apart a couple sections. See what really makes them work. Often it's a subtle thing, a certain two-word phrase, an excellently-placed hyphen. Or a single line of description or action or beat interspersed in a speech.

Remember that the goal is to get the reader to see it, to hear it, to feel it. You do that by hearing it yourself, seeing it yourself, feeling it yourself, and then literally transcribing the scene that blooms in your imagination. It's magic, really - that transfer of imagery from my mind to yours. That's why writing's fun. Or at least that's what I keep telling myself.

 

"Very well -- Know this, Voldemort: There is but one simple truth," said Dumbledore, in a calm voice, which held power and authority, as if the very words he spoke came from the mouth of God. His blue eyes were set, and the twinkle reflected in his half-moon glasses had left long ago, replaced with fiery determination, "Death is the ultimate consummation, and none can escape it!"

A scowl replaced the smile on Timmy's face, and he said, slowly, as if speaking to a child, "Tom -- What did you say about my mother?"

"Nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all," said Tom, quickly looking down, fidgeting under his questioner's gaze.

Before the situation could get out of hand, Tebow took a hurried step in-between them both, and his intentions were made clear. Yet under the stony glare of Timmy, Tebow's voice thinned out and was a barely heard whisper, "P-please Timmy -- Just calm down and let's be reasonable here," said Tebow, but he was violently interrupted.

"Fuck off!" said Timmy, uncaring of the terror he caused.

 

I'll be mostly repeating what Sesc and Newcomb said, but I'll do it anyway because it bears repeating.

Salty Baggins, have you ever seen one of those tricky visual puzzles where you're told to count how many times the word "of" is used? You find 3, then it turns out there are 6 - mind blown. The word does the job of making the language make sense. Your brain registers it on some level, but you skip it. Same thing with "said" in dialogue. It does what it needs to do - space out dialogue, separate lines of dialogue, different characters, so that you can make sense of what's what, and it does all that without seeming redundant. Every time you use something other than "said", it draws attention to itself. That's why those words should be used when you specifically want to draw attention to the fact that the character said something angrily.

Of course, the best way to convey that is through dialogue itself and context. If your dialogue flows well and the context is clear, you don't need all-caps, just an exclamation point, maybe italics for emphasis (at least I do that, a lot - it's a personal stylistic choice) and the reader should still be able to understand that Harry is pissed and ranting. Less is more, as they say and it's true in this case. If I see something like this:

I nope out. This is an overload of information that indicates that the writer couldn't find a smarter way to convey what they wanted, which means that the whole build up to that single line of dialogue was probably poorly constructed. Then again, all-caps are not a crime - they were invented to be used, so use them when appropriate. Finding the appropriate placement is the challenge.

I've learned a lot about writing dialogue in the 2 years I'e been active on DLP. The dialogue sticky Sesc mentioned was the first thing I read. It's a good base, but you won't really learn until you fuck up a few times, I feel. I'm telling you all this from personal experience and as we know people think differently, so whatever I say may not work at all for you, but I hope you'll find a nugget or two in this post that will ring true.

The thing about dialogue is that looking at any particular singled out sentence said by someone makes sense if they're talking to themselves. As Jon said, dialogue is reactive. In a conversation, no matter how many people are talking, dialogue is all connected. One thing must make sense being said after another, or reference something said earlier. You're not creating clever one-liners. You're creating a chain and each line is a link. There can be more than one chain in a conversation, but then the challenge is not just being able to keep track of all the chains yourself (you're the author, you know what's going on) - you have to make sure the readers can as well.

Actual words spoken by characters are the most important part of any dialogue scene, of course, but they're the skeleton without meat. Everything else is for flavor and to help convey what you want conveyed to the reader. It's sort of like dressing on a salad. Too little and you're just eating grass. If you just have lines of dialogue with no indication of who's speaking to who... well, you're not a movie, you don't have the luxury of omitting that because the image will do the rest. You have to provide the image. If there's too much dressing, then actual dialogue gets lost in between everything else and you'll lose readers as they try to read along. That's bad, because no one likes to backtrack to try and make sense of the text. You're not writing a textbook.

Write your dialogue keeping the scene in mind. You know what it is, but remember that you need to tell the readers that. They're not in your head, they need some context (who's in the scene and who's talking when). Read it out loud. Literary dialogue will never be a super accurate representation of real life, because most real people don't talk like characters in Aaron Sorkin's scripts, all sharp wit all the time. At the same time, you want characters to approximately sound like they're not robots (unless they're robots). Writing dialogue is an art of finding middle ground between the errs, ehhs and awkward pauses of real life and poetry. More or less.

 

My writing has many weaknesses, perhaps the greatest of them is dialogue.

I know what it's supposed to look and sound like. I know the form and structure it should take, I have read any number of treatises on 'How to write good dialogue' and still I have the same problems.

Tags, beats, adverbs, voices.

I insert tags or beats into almost every piece of dialogue. When I'm writing, even when I'm re-reading, I feel the lack if I do not. Without them I feel like the dialogue is moving too fast; like it is hurtling along out of my control. And so I pepper all my dialogue with far far too many tags. So much so that I have to make a conscious effort to insert beats in the place of tags where I can. They still often feel forced.

Adverbs are probably my greatest Achilles' Heel. They are just so damn inviting. 'Quietly', 'softly', 'forcefully', 'confidently', 'quickly'. All of those are just so useful that even in the knowledge that I should try to resist I cannot. In fact I find I do not want to resist. There is no punctuation mark for speed, and inserting some descriptive beat will slow the dialogue down, not speed it up. You can whisper or murmur; declare or pronounce but 'said' is so much more comfortable. In addition you can only insert such words wish care and scarcity, if you need to repeat the action then those accursed adverbs rear their head and, my, don't they look inviting?

And, finally, voices. This is perhaps the easiest overcome, it merely takes planning and a willingness to revisit what you have already written. I find that character voices develop over time as I become more familiar with the character, but establishing them can be a painful process indeed.

Those issues are quite apart from the realism of the speech. My style of writing is perhaps more suited to speeches and pronouncements, it is often too heavy and unwieldy for more lighthearted back-and-forth.

It is an endless learning process, of course. But I often feel that as I learn more about how dialogue 'should' be done I am actually find myself drifting further from it.

It is a strange thing.

 

Steelbadger:

That's not necessarily a bad thing. JKR herself uses a lot of attributive adverbs (for instance, see the quote in the spoiler here). Some people have criticized her for it, but I find it strangely unobtrusive in her writing.

 

Dialogue is pretty cool/ tricky. A few things I've noticed:

1) Adverbs work really well when you've just fed the reader something syntax heavy. Did you just stress them out with hardcore description and heavy metaphor? Let the reader chill out afterward. Some people prefer not to use them at all. I like the middle (maybe 80/ 20) road.

2) Go into each conversation with a questioning mindset. Why are the characters talking to each other? What do they want to get out of this interaction? Do they both want to be having this conversation?

3) Be careful of action heavy tags. Wildbow (of Worm, Pact, and Twig fame) is really fond of these. Too many and it can feel like you're being hit in the face with a googly-eyed brick rather than a person.

Knowing who your characters are, what they want, and why they're there is probably the most important thing. It's also a good idea to ask yourself where they were before the start of the story or the dialogue. If you can convince the reader that characters have lives off-screen then you're golden.

This is more of an art than a science though. Just dropping in lines explaining things rarely works .