If you want to ensure reader engagement, then one of the most important features of your writing is your dialogue. Some writers have a lot of hang-ups about writing dialogue, but then some readers are very particular in their expectations. You need to ensure that the writing style you choose suits the setting and theme of your writing, while also conveying a sense of realism relative to that setting or theme.

In this write-up, we’ll give some general advice about writing dialogue and then suggest some appropriate styles depending on the kind of story you’re working on.*

*The advice, opinions, and suggestions given here are those of the Author and are not intended to be authoritative or absolute.

-

Keep it Real

When your characters have conversations, your readers need to engage with them and feel that their interactions are at least credible. That credibility, however, comes from creating conversations relevant to the time and place (real or imagined) in which they are set. In the same way that French people don’t speak English all day long, neither do people from the 16th century speak modern English!

If you’re writing historical fiction or period drama, do your research. Check out old dictionaries and lexicons, and be aware of older forms of the words and phrases you want your characters to use. You live in the present, and so your understanding of how people converse is rooted in the present. You need to find a way to express modern sentiment in an outdated way. If you’re not going too far back in time, and there are still books in print that were written in that time period, get as old a version as you can and see how people really spoke; or at least how the authors wished to present their reality.

The flipside of this is that if you go too far - and you write conversations that are entirely out of sync with modern English, and completely unrecognisable - your readers won’t be able to engage at all. They’ll be so lost that they won’t read much; they’ll have to keep looking words up online to try to figure out what they mean!

An important thing to rememer when writing conversation is that real-life conversation is messy. It’s full of people interrupting and talking over each other, and people getting cut off mid-sentence and having to repeat themselves. This is not a helpful way to write dialogue, at least not in a short story or novel. It might have some merit in a screenplay, where the viewer doesn’t have to do anything but watch and listen (although most actors would create this effect through improvisation), but when a reader is jumping around from character to character and no one is finishing a sentence, it’s difficult to convey the idea that everyone is talking at once. If you still want to show this happening, you might be able to put it like this:

-

By not showing who was talking, you convey the sense of confusion and chaos in the room. The reader will appreciate the madness. While this might work for some readers, others might find it confusing. Just remember that fictional dialogue, while aiming to emulate real-life conversation, doesn’t have to be precisely realistic, and you can compromise in places. Of course, it’s important to stay on point, as the aim of your dialogue should always be to progress the story, and not to indulge in nonsensical ramblings, which - let’s face it - most of us do every day. In this sense, your dialogue should be as much part of the structure of the narrative as anything else. It needs to matter to the story.

Note the way interrupted dialogue is presented here. The dash indicates that a word was intended but cut off (abruptly) by the next (or another) speaker. The three dots (type three full-stops/periods) indicates an intent to continue but without as much urgency - the speaker paused in their delivery.