At the April 2019 Atlanta Writers Club meeting, my friend Jill Cox-Cordova and I filled in as last-minute replacements for an ailing workshop speaker. We did ninety minutes of “Ask Jill and George,” focusing for the initial hour on the intended workshop topic of dialogue. The following was inspired by that energetic Q&A, including some things I wish I’d had the presence of mind to include (I always think better in reflective writing than in spontaneous speech):

Many beginning writers receive an assignment in class to go to a public place, eavesdrop on conversations, and transcribe them verbatim, so you will learn how to write dialogue. This is terrible advice…and also helpful.

How can it be both?

This is terrible advice because written dialogue is to transcribed speech as a piano sonata is to a cat running back and forth across the eighty-eight keys. Transcribe any amount of speech and you’ll see that people rarely speak in complete, coherent sentences. We tend to talk in phrases, change tenses, lose the flow of logic, fail to make our subjects and verbs agree, and fill our conversations with needless words, phrases, and random sounds. If you tried to read a book of nothing but verbatim dialogue, you’d hate the experience.

On the other hand, this exercise reminds us that people speak imperfectly and some of this should appear on our pages to differentiate one speaker from another. Here’s another thing listening to real-life conversations will tell you: while we all speak imperfectly, each of us has a distinct form of imperfection based on region, upbringing, other social influences, and how our brains process all of that idiosyncratically to produce unique speech patterns and our individual literal and figurative “voices.”

Writers can exploit these voice differences in a multitude of ways: characters who speak in phrases rather than full subject-verb-predicate sentences; regional expressions and ways of combining words that remind the reader of those characters’ roots; talking with lots of contractions, few, or none at all; people who speak lyrically; speech shot through with profanity; abrupt vs. indirect ways of replying; and so on.

In your writing, dialogue is going to usually be much more sensible and correct than what we hear in real life, because it needs to do more than show 2+ characters on a page jawing at each other for the sake of talking (or texting, nowadays). Dialogue, then, is a facsimile of authentic speech, not its identical twin.

Furthermore, unlike in real life, every line of written conversation needs to have a reason, or your reader will start scanning down the page in search of substance. Dialogue in a scene serves two purposes: to move the story forward by showing how characters clash, agree, or disclose information in their conversations and also by revealing (or concealing) characters’ emotions and motives.

I’ve heard writers defend shallow dialogue by claiming, “I write fluffy beach-reads; there’s not supposed to be any there there.” However, a huge chasm of difference exists between a superficial beach-read and a work that wastes a reader’s time. The former is a diversion, a means of abandoning one’s cares by losing oneself in the magic of story; the latter is a source of frustration and annoyance—and, depending on the price and time invested, produces the feeling of being cheated or even robbed.

There does in fact need to be some there there—“But there, there,” he consoled, because it’s really not hard to make your dialogue serve one or both purposes in each scene. All you need to do is remove or paraphrase the nonessentials, such as greetings, pleasant partings, and meandering leadups to substantive conversation, and focus on what you need the dialogue to achieve in any given scene.

Another mistake beginning writers make is to force their dialogue to do too much. Rather than trusting narrative text to convey information readers need to understand, the writer forces his characters to engage in “As you know, Bob” conversations that supply facts they both already possess but the reader doesn’t:

“But, Lucius, how will it be possible to drill through that mountain and save your beloved Rosalie?” Robert inquired.

Lucius stroked his goatee, eyes glinting. He imparted, “As you know, Bob, we’ve developed the new Tri-Bore 3800 with a patented sonic technology that converts any solid to gas, enabling us to carve a tunnel through those 657.3 miles of rock and leave a smooth cylinder through which we will drive our new electric car, yielding minimal ecological impact other than what amounts to a granite fart.”

“Oh yes, Lucius!” Robert exclaimed. “I do recall you mentioning that at the symposium on Cypress! ‘Smells surprisingly of citrus and sesame,’ you explained to me.”

No, this isn’t an excerpt from my latest novel, but I’m sure I wrote something just as execrable once. In this example, I made other typical mistakes for your amusement, too: characters calling each other by their names, which sounds stilted and odd (people seldom if ever use one another’s names in real life); needless gestures and descriptions (oh, those glinting eyes); overuse of exclamation points (limit yourself to one per book! Maybe two, tops!); fancy dialogue tags (instead of trusting “said” or “asked” to do the job, and only then if needed); excessive alliteration; and a ponderous monologue that would leave anyone but a marathoner breathless.

While I recommend avoiding lots of pointless visual fillers between chunks of dialogue—usually things with one’s hands such as an actor might do so he’s not just standing still—you also want to avoid the “talking heads in the void” situation, where all you present is people saying things to each other without  reminding the reader of the setting in which they exist. Bringing in senses other than the visual helps: the ways things sound, smell, feel, and taste. I’ve found that these keep a reader in the scene, as they experience these sensations along with the point-of-view character.

Another tip is to read your dialogue to other people, not just to yourself or your pet. When you read of others, you’ll become self-conscious and aware of the way the dialogue actually sounds rather than what you heard in your head while writing and editing it. Melodrama, over-the-top emotions, missing words, echoes (repeated words or phrases), and other mistakes all become apparent. Some writers even get other people to read their scene back to them so they can hear where the reader stumbles, emphasizes the wrong word, and so on, to facilitate rewrites.

A final question that came up during the impromptu “Ask Jill and George” Q&A was whether dialogue can be on the first page, or is it better to use that space for world-building, scene-setting, character description, and action? Remember, there’s only one rule in writing: you can do anything you want, but you must do it well. I’ve read wonderful books that open with dialogue and minimal other elements—I’ve also read awful books that begin this way. Ask yourself, “What is important for the reader to understand and feel?” at the start and then at every other moment in your book, and you’ll know what’s needed in terms of dialogue, action, and narrative all along the way.

If there’s a second rule of writing, it’s that your words should intentionally cause readers to think and experience emotions!