If the hardest part of creative writing is nailing good characters, the hardest part of nailing good characters is expressing them through dialogue. I’ve far from mastered this myself, and I suspect many authors will confidently say the same. It’s one of those things that never quite feels good enough, at least to me. It’s one of the highest expressions of skill as an author, the tip of the iceberg that proves you’ve successfully executed on all other aspects of your characters and story. There’s as much stylistic choice as there are commonly accepted rules, and it’s up to you to decide which decisions you’d like to make. Let’s get into it.
”She said” versus “she growled through a grimace.” Or further yet, floating dialogue where there’s no tags at all. You have a ton of room for expression as an author. There is no right answer. However, I’d argue, there are wrong ones - or at least, if the reader has a hard time following, I’m assuming you don’t want that.
The debate is as old as time: minimalistic versus maximalist. “He said”/”She said” is so mechanical that readers just breeze past it as if it were a period or a comma. The ‘saids’ and ‘floating’ dialogue, where you have no tag at all, heavily emphasize minimalism. Letting the dialogue speak for itself. Then there’s the maximalist approach, where authors are pulling out every word but 'said', and trying to paint a visual and action along with every line said. And of course, as with all things in life, most sane people find themselves at a balance somewhere in between these points.
Saying something does not make it gospel. Let me repeat. Saying something does not make it gospel. I had to learn this the hard way! You would be amazed what readers are willing to let go in one ear and out the other just so they can continue their reading pace and keep churning through pages. Just because you mentioned a character is blonde on page five does not mean the reader will remember it on page one hundred and five.
This is likewise true for more pertinent details. Two characters playing cards at a bar? If they don’t actively comment on that happening, and interact with their setting, the reader will lose track of the setting entirely. They’ll drift towards a ‘floating heads’ vision of the scene. This is true in cinema too. Even with the visual aids of movies, you’ll still see characters go out of their way to interact with their setting to keep you grounded and remind you of where they are.
This is especially painful when multiple characters are involved in a scene. The quintessential example I have seen of this (many times, including having made this mistake myself) is a dinner table. Let’s say an author decides to throw a dinner party with a family of six and two guests. And let’s say it’s in the first few chapters of the book so we don’t have a strong grasp and image of everyone in our minds yet. This is hard. Tracking who’s saying what, who’s sitting where, etc - it’s a nightmare. For novice authors (again, I have done this myself!) I’ve seen people attempt to stuff more dialogue tags in, more actions in. And to be honest, it doesn’t work. Grinding the scene almost to slow motion to highlight every cut of the steak on a plate, every look from one character to another, every remark, it’s hellish - both for the author, and the reader.
Rather, in both complicated scenes like a dinner party, or just throughout your writing in general, focus on what’s relevant to the POV character. Readers, without even noticing, define what they care about by taking their cues from what the POV character cares about. As a reader, I won’t remember well that Aunt Sera cut her steak with clumsy hands before speaking. But I’ll remember that our POV character keeps physically cringing from the nails on a chalkboard noise that her annoying stuck-up aunt won’t seem to stop making as she practically minces her steak on the plate and rambles in a nasaly voice. When in doubt, use more POV character internalization and grounding language, if it’s important to the character, it’s important to the reader and they will track it!
I am absolutely convinced that nailing this is one of the hardest things to do in life, period. To get to this point, an author needs a flawless character, a good plot that they interweave with and that brings out a character’s highlights, and an amazing scene and context that lets them shine. Then on top of all that, they need to have mastered jumping into their perspective, being them. And on top of all that, then they also have to have good prose and be able to ‘not speak like themselves’. This is crazy hard! Next level stuff.
Dialogue is at it’s best when you can tell who’s speaking without so much as a single dialogue tag. That’s not to say there shouldn't be dialogue tags, that fellow author, is up to you. However, tags or no tags, you want the actual words being said by the character to be distinct enough to sound different statement by statement to a reader. For them not to all sound like little copies of yourself talking back and forth to one another. This is achieved through getting in your character’s heads, being them. It is an amazingly hard thing to do, and the best advice I can give you is already expanded upon in my Yet Another Character System post. However, the one thing I can say for certain, is the better fleshed out and excellent your characters are, the better you are able to be in their perspectives, and the more capable you are of doing this.
Up until now, I’ve pretty much regurgitated the common advice you’ll already find online. But there are some ‘how do I do that’ items that I’d like to mention that you can draw upon to deliberately walk yourself towards these ideals. First of all, while you don’t always get this luxury, scenes with clear roles are awesome! What do I mean by that? Let’s use an example, a bank robber and a bank teller:
“Give me the fucking money”
“Oh God, oh, well-”
”Now”
Scenes with clear roles mean that at least two characters’ expected ways of interacting with one another are so unique, that you can’t help but easily keep track of who’s who as a reader. Oftentimes, this is achieved through a clear power dynamic, whether through physical coercion or social pressure. Here are some cross genre example where that holds true:
The list goes on. But generally speaking, if you can pit two characters in a situation as wanting distinctly different things from that interaction, you're off to a good start. Note that their wants don’t have to be conflicting per se (although they certainly can be), just… different. Let’s take a Professor vs. Pupil example. The pupil wants to master magic, is frustrated with his repeated failed attempts. He wants to impress that master. To progress as a mage. The professor wants to instill discipline in the pupil. Feels confident they will master this knowledge in time, but wants to make sure they learn emotional stability and to wield it appropriately. They want to see their legacy, both in magic and in values, passed on. Perhaps they even want to see the pupil learn to be less hard on themselves. Or with a different spin, perhaps they wish they’d stop burning through so many expensive reagents in their attempts to master this specific spell, but feel hard pressed not to say as much as to place yet more pressure on the pupil. In an easier more traditional example, we could take a Boss vs. Employee scenario. The employee just asked for a raise, the boss doesn’t want to give it. Upper management is already scrutinizing middle management hard this quarter, but perhaps it’d look worse to lose talent all together. You get the idea.
People rarely speak directly in life, they don’t tend to speak ‘on the nose’. Thoughts remind them of other thoughts, things distract them. They have funny ways of commenting on things, opinions on things said. Conversations dip and swerve. And with characters in writing, this expectation tends to be even higher. Let’s look at an ‘on the nose’ (I’d argue bad) example, and then a more natural one:
”Is that a hot dog”
”Yes”
“And you put cheese and chilli on it?”
“I did, I like that.”
“You like that? I don’t like that. That’s not how they make hot dogs where I’m from.”
Alright, yuck. Even writing that hurt. Let’s try this again:
“You call that a fucking hot dog?”
“Like you would know, you were vegan for two years.”
“I can’t even see the dog under that mound of slop. What is that, cheese?”
”As God intended.”
“I can’t believe you, don’t know how I suffer being your roommate.”
“Look who’s talking, I’m not the one with the bad gas issue.”
While I might be guilty of writing one of those exchanges as if it were happening between robots, it highlights the point quite well. Things they are saying are reminding them of other things, hell, they’re even pulling in more character background and making it relevant to the POV character/reader. They often don’t answer the questions they’re asked, instead perrying to other points when the answer is obvious. They highlight and emphasize certain points, dip and weave as interested.
While this post is specifically on dialogue, I just want to really emphasize that this is one puzzle piece of portraying a character, and of telling a story. One tool. It’s a damned strong one, and a hard one to wield at that. But it’s meant to be used in lock step with other tools. Dialogue that runs too long without internalization (AKA your character’s thoughts/thinking) gets pretty dry. Any lack of action (AKA people doing things and stuff) gets pretty dry also. Dialogue is meant to be weaved among your other tools, a component to a scene. While where you define the balance is up to you, do keep in mind that it is in fact just that, a balance.
Translating what people say in their feedback to what you can actionably do to fix and improve your writing is an incredibly hard thing to do. I struggled with this one line of critique for a long time in particular. But now, it’s your lucky day, as I’ve learned and am ready to pass that lesson along. If you are receiving this feedback, it is almost always for one of two reasons:
I just described above what being ‘too on the nose' entails, so I won’t do that again, but also notice I tacked on ‘too railroady’. If your dialogue is just nakedly shuffling us along without really fitting into the story too well, readers will pick up on that too. Any flavor of ‘too direct’ or ‘too servicing the story’ tends to stick out like a sore thumb, it destroys the suspension of disbelief that you didn’t orchestrate this as a laser cause and effect type story (or, however you organized it).
The other problem tends to come in when a character isn’t acting themselves. Or perhaps in more niche scenarios, where we don’t know a character well enough yet, and they’re doing something absurd but the author isn’t doing a good enough job on selling us of the fact that this makes perfect sense for that character to do. Unfortunately, I can’t prescribe you a sure-fire way to avoid this, except for pointing you back to my Yet Another Character System post. And emphasizing just how serious being able to be your characters is. That you need a complete mastery of what it’s like to be them, and if you achieve that, you’re pretty darn suited to avoid hitting this problem in particular.
Less is more. Reading an annoying accent is, well, just that: annoying. You can absolutely pull off certain accents, but almost always, less is more. An initial statement and the occasional reminder that a character does in fact have an accent. Maybe having it show in a select few very strong specific words or phrases, but you don’t want it to actually get in the way of a reader's experience. This is of course, also a gradient. Things like a Scottish accent, are going to have a lot more forgiveness from readers than, let’s say an actual stutter. Where every fourth word has t-t-t-this in front of it.
And finally, foreign lingo is a dangerous game. I’ve found that if it’s language a reader can easily decipher or phrases common English readers know anyways, it’s safe. But otherwise, it usually gets a poor reception. For example: “bon voyage”, “mi amigo”, “hasta la vista”, “mi amora”; those tend to be fine. Those are fun flourishes. But when you start writing whole lines of dialogue in French. Or having more specific flourishes that your common reader won’t understand, that’s usually a problem. At that point you either want to just tell the reader that a character is in fact saying this in a foreign language instead of English, or you want to double down on your character’s POV and maybe show that a character just said some incomprehensible vaguely French sounding gibberish.
Enjoy!