Writing Better Dialogue: What It Really Takes

Writing dialogue can often feel daunting. When faced with everything it is said to achieve—advance the plot, build character, create tension, add atmosphere-- it can begin to feel like a juggling act. When is it doing one thing rather than another? Or is it meant to be doing them all at once? It’s no surprise that many developing writers try to avoid it altogether, hoping their characters will make do with weighty silences and meaningful looks.

Part of the anxiety stems from the way dialogue appears on the page. As it is often set apart by quotes, it's easy to assume that it is doing something different to the rest of the story, or that vastly different skills are involved in its creation. In practice, though, this isn’t the case.

Were we to look again at the list of dialogue’s supposed duties-- advance the plot, build character, create tension, add atmosphere-- we might notice that none of these are unique to dialogue. They are simply what the narrative as a whole is meant to do. Dialogue, in other words, isn’t a separate mechanism at all; it’s just another way the story carries itself forward.

So when dialogue feels too difficult, or when the dialogue we manage to write feels somehow bland or unconvincing, the problem is rarely limited to the dialogue itself. More often it points to something broader-- usually one of two things, and sometimes, both.

The first is a lack of clarity about the story as a whole. Without a clear sense of its shape-- its arc, its direction, its very reason for existing-- dialogue has little to hold on to. And when that happens, it isn’t just dialogue that suffers. It’s everything.

But what are we really talking about when it comes to the story’s arc? It may be surprising, especially if we’ve been trained to focus on goals, but the answer actually lies in the main character’s flaw, or as is often the case in genre fiction, the villain’s flaw. The story, then, is the story of the flaw, and as the bearer of the flaw moves through the world on their misguided course, opportunities for conversation will naturally arise. Determining what to include from these opportunities depends on a few different factors, pacing perhaps chief of all. But it’s the flaw that guides us to those moments, often intuitively and without our needing to track the dialogue's exact purpose.

The second problem relates to subtext, which is easily the most misunderstood element of story writing. This is because it is usually mistaken for something characters use in conversation, when in fact it has more to do with how the writer communicates to the reader.

What, then, is subtext? It is perhaps easier to say what it does: it creates cohesion, reflects on the story’s action, and perhaps most importantly, helps the writer to generate details. It is baked into the fibers of the story, which is why the well-intentioned advice to improve our dialogue by “adding” subtext, as if it were a favorite brand of hot sauce, makes little sense. If not taken into consideration at the beginning of the writing process, the story-- including the dialogue-- will feel thin, disjointed and impersonal, for it is here that we are able to be our most creative, where the work really becomes ours.

Deeper structural issues and a story-level lack of subtext are usually the reason why well-meaning advice for improving one’s dialogue rarely works. I am referring now to the familiar suggestions on making your dialogue sound natural, which usually involves making it leaner and more spontaneous. These tips can certainly be useful, but only when the structure is sound and the subtext is doing its job.

A more fruitful course of action is to investigate what it is that connects your dialogue to the rest of your story-- or rather, how do your structure and subtext combine to support it. The answers to that will do far more to improve your dialogue (and your story as a whole) than trimming words, making use of interjections, or secretly listening to conversations at your local cafe.