To write good dialogue, show the emotion behind the words, keep it interesting whatever its length, act it out to hear whether it sounds natural, skip needless tags, give each character a voice of their own, and break up long conversations with action.
Well-written dialogue is one of the ingredients of fiction that bring the interactions between your characters to life. Together with description and narration, it gives your characters more depth. Great dialogue does not come easily, but these tips can help.
1. Show emotions
Is your character speaking as if they are about to murder the other person, or matter-of-factly? The words alone may not be enough for readers to grasp the mood of the scene. Show your readers what is going on by describing how the conversation is carried out: "Get out," she said, her voice shaking.
2. Short or long, make it interesting
Dialogue does not have to be short to be interesting. It is fine for one character to do all the talking and give the other little chance to break in. One example is the web novel Re:Zero, in which Echidna, the Witch of Greed, tries at great length to persuade the main character, Subaru, to accept her help. The scene is long, and it is captivating.
3. Act it out
Your dialogue may look believable on paper, but how does it sound when real people say it? Does it still sound good, or does it make you cringe?
Act the dialogue out in front of a mirror, or read it aloud, to catch the small details that make a conversation unbelievable. Whether the conversation is between two humans or between a human and a sentient robot, it has to be believable.
What is believable dialogue? Simply put, it is dialogue that your readers find natural. If a five-year-old talks with the wisdom of a veteran, your readers will just shake their heads.
4. Don't keep telling readers who is talking
You do not need "he said", "said Ted", or a variation of them after every line. Readers can often tell who is talking without being told.
For example, when two people talk, you often only need to say who speaks first. When you give each character's lines a paragraph of their own, it is easy to follow who is saying what.
You can also help readers by using names in the dialogue itself. If Tom and Brady are talking in the car and one of them says, "It's not that easy, Brady," you know for sure that Tom is speaking.
5. Give each character a different voice
Giving your characters distinct ways of talking is a great way to tell them apart in dialogue. A nihilist talks differently from a happy-go-lucky person, even when they discuss the same topic.
Give your characters different accents if they come from different parts of the country. Or make their speech flowery, eloquent, rambling, ornate, poetic, wordy, incoherent, or anything else that suits them.
If you are stuck, go out and observe. Listen to people's conversations and take notes on what makes one speaker different from another. After all, being a good observer is one of the traits of a good writer, and it helps with describing your characters, too.
6. Break up dialogue with action
During long dialogue, readers can easily lose track of what is happening. Break it up with action: show readers what the characters are doing while they talk.
In a conversation between two people on a date, for example, you can break up the stream of dialogue by describing how one of them looks nervous, or how the other tries too hard to impress with every gesture.
Guidelines, not rules
Do not treat these tips as the rules of writing dialogue. Think of them as guidelines, or rules of thumb. In creative writing, breaking the rules can sometimes set you apart from the crowd. If you have your own way of doing something, do it.
Once you get the hang of writing dialogue, practice writing internal monologue, too. It is an excellent way to show your characters' inner struggles and ideas. And when you punctuate your dialogue, the post on punctuation inside or outside quotation marks shows where the commas and periods go.