Quick Tips to Help You Master Dialogue in Writing

Ever struggled to write dialogue that sounds natural and captures the essence of your characters?

This week's quick tips will help you overcome that challenge.

Tip #1: Listen to people talk in real life. Hang out in different locations with people from different walks of life. They don't speak the same!

Tip #2: Don't overdo dialect. While you want your characters to be unique, you don't want them to sound like a stereotype, and you don't want to tire out your reader.

Bonus Tip #3: Avoid fillers. You don't need to write "well", "um", or other conversational fillers. Get straight to the point.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Author Wheel podcast.
I'm Megan Haskell,award-winning fantasy author of
the Signore Chronicles and theRise of Lilith series.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
And I'm Greta Boris, usa Today bestselling author of
the Mortician Murders and thesoon-to-be-released Almost True
Crime series.
Together we are the AuthorWheel.
Our goal is to help youovercome your writing roadblocks
so you can keep your storiesrolling.
This week we're going to diveinto one of my favorite topics,
which is dialogue.

(00:30):
So tip number one listen to howpeople talk.
I know that sounds reallyobvious, but you would be amazed
at how often the dialogue inearly drafts of people's
manuscripts or even poorlyedited published books I've read
some crazy dialogue in librarybooks and all that kind of thing

(00:52):
.
It just sounds totally weird.
It sounds like the author'svoice or the narrator's voice.
It's like very well editeddialogue, which is not the way
we speak.
It's just not realistic.
And one of my pet peeves is thatpeople from different walks of

(01:13):
life speak differently.
They use vocabulary from theirregion or from their industry.
They have a unique cadence.
Even different personalitytypes will speak differently.
So if you follow the Enneagramlike we talked about last week,
achievers often want to wowpeople with their words,
reformers want to persuade andindividualists probably don't

(01:36):
care what people think and aregoing to be really blunt.
So even taking personality typeinto consideration is big, yeah
.
So a personal example of this iswhen I was writing the first
version of this the book thatwill be the Hiding Place coming
out soon.
I had a POV character in thatfirst version.

(01:58):
He's not a POV character in thenew version, but he was, and he
was a first generation American, the son of two Hispanic
immigrants who grew up bilingual.
He also had a degree inlandscape architecture and ran a
landscape maintenance business.
So about a week or two before Iturned that book in to the
editor, I realized all hisdialogue, both internal and

(02:22):
external, sounded exactly likethe main characters.
Who was his girlfriend?
She was a white female with anEnglish degree who worked in a
school library and wanted to bea published author.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
So like how Very different.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yes, so different.
So what I ended up having to do, because, just to get his voice
correct, what I ended up havingto do, because, just to get his
voice correct, I rewrote allhis chapters, and there was a
significant number of them.
I rewrote them in the firstperson, trying to channel his
voice in my head, like the kindof cadence that he might have

(02:59):
and the word choices that hemight make and how his worldview
would be different than hers.
And then, after I did that, Ihad to go back and put all those
chapters back into third person, because they were supposed to
be in third person.
Well, my editor was not happybecause there was a lot of

(03:20):
grammatical errors, I'm justtelling you, but I did get his
voice right, so so anyway, yeah,yeah.
Yeah, so it was a big deal.
So if you can kind of strikefor that on your first draft,
you're going to save yourself alot of time.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yes, but so tip number two is kind of related to
this, but it's the knife's edge, the balancing act that we have
to, you know, be careful ofwhen we're writing, because you
do want to make your character'svoice unique, but not too
unique either.
So, especially when it comes todialect.

(03:57):
So like dialect, you know, iswhen you know they, they have a,
an accent that you hear in yourhead and you write the, you
know misspellings or things likethat, right.
So so you got to be really,really careful with how much
dialect you put put into yourbook.
You have to kind of think of itlike spice in your cooking too
much.
To kind of think of it likespice in your cooking Too much

(04:18):
and you can't swallow it, you'regoing to burn your tongue,
you're going to spit it out.
Won't work Too little and yourstory can feel bland and boring.
So it's really kind ofthreading that needle to find
the right balance and it will inpart depend on your story and
it will in part depend on yourcharacter.
But having one character with aword or two that they say

(04:41):
differently or that you spelldifferently, for them to say in
your head right, like, there's aLike y'all.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
If you had a seven character you could say y'all
here and there, but if it wasy'all, y'all, y'all, y'all, all
the y'all time, yeah, yourreaders are going, or you were
doing too many.
Y'all want some pecans in thebayou.
It's going to get overdone.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
Right, but.
But here's the trick, right?
So when you're doing that, ifyou had a character that said
y'all, and the reader mightinterpret pecan instead of
pecancan based on the fact thatthey say y'all.
So you're going to still spellpecan the same as pecan
regardless, but then it's up tothe reader to actually interpret
that differently.

(05:26):
So my example that that I hadwas that I had a troll character
in one of my, in the Senyarichronicles, and instead of
saying you, he said yeah, right,like that was, that was in my
head, that was.
That was the dialect.
Well, when I got the audio bookmade, the narrator interpreted

(05:47):
that as ye so, so ye all want,and it sounded like a pirate a
little bit Funny.
She made it work because she'sa fantastic voice actress, but
it was, it was.
It proved my point to myself, Iguess, that how you write it on

(06:08):
the page, ultimately the readeris interpreting that.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
So you have to be really careful with what you put
in, how you put it in, how muchyou use, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's that balancing act, yes, and also, if you do too much
dialect, you do run the risk ofturning that character into like
a stereotype.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
We I think we both actually read an early
submission at a conference onetime.
Maybe you didn't get the sameone, I did, but I know we both
had submissions from the samewriter and this writer was
trying to put in a characterthat was British and it was so

(06:52):
not the way modern Britishpeople speak.
It was so stereotypical, likeBritish from the Victorian era
or British from 100 years ago orthere was so much blimeys and
bloody this and blimey that andit was like I would go listen to

(07:14):
like 10 podcasts that are by.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
Brits, go listen to our interview with Stephanie
Carey.
Yeah, yeah, or Stephen Moore.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah, or Joanna Penn.
There was no blimeys and nobloodies.
Yeah, it was just too, sothat's it yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, you just gotta be.
You gotta be careful about it,right, you don't?
You don't want to bestereotypical and you don't want
to be offensive either, right,as you know.
So.
So, yeah, you do have to becareful about that.
Now I do have a bonus tip thatI just thought of Woohoo, yeah,
yeah.
So bonus tip number three todayis in dialogue, in written
dialogue, avoid the fillers.

(07:56):
Hello, how are you?
How are you?
It's good today, I don't know.
Well, maybe People do talk thatway a lot of the time, but in
the written word, you don't wantto actually have those fillers
in your dialogue.
You want to make it a littlebit more concise.
So, being careful to you know,get right to the point of the

(08:20):
dialogue to use partialsentences, cut off sentences,
but use them sparingly and avoidthe back and forth pleasantries
, if you will, that we all usein actual day-to-day
conversation but that make forreally boring dialogue on the

(08:40):
written page dialogue.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
I write it the way I hear the characters in my head
talking, and then put it asideand then maybe the next day I go
back and I often edit out andclean up those fillers.
You know Exactly the you knowsand the wills.
Like I'm saying to you andyou're saying to me, but on the
page it's like oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
Yep, exactly, exactly .
So there you go, bonus tip.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
So if you are enjoying this podcast, please
consider supporting the show.
We will give a shout out to youand to your books or products
and services for authors.
At the bottom of each episodeshow notes is a link that will
lead you to a place where youcan donate as little as $3 a
month to help us cover theongoing expenses.

(09:38):
I almost said suspenses,because you know that's what I
like.
Yeah, I like hosting andediting.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah, and quick, quick note on that too.
That shout out will happen inthe intro to the interview
episode, so just when you'regoing back and going.
Did they say my name?
Did they say my name?
That's when you'll hear it.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yeah, isn't there a song?
Say my name, say my name.
Probably Anyway yeah, so sorryI digress.
Yes, that will be there, andanother way to support us is to
leave a five-star review andshare your favorite episode with
a writer friend.
So until next time, keep yourstories rolling.