Dialogue serves as a powerful thread that weaves together stories, characters, and emotions. Whether you’re a new writer just getting started or a seasoned professional, it can be easy to stumble into dialogue writing pitfalls. Indeed, there are a number of things that might go wrong with dialogue: think characters that sound excessively similar, confusing punctuation, unbalanced dialogue tags, or endless exposition dumps. These mistakes can significantly detract from your worldbuilding and overall story.

By keeping these common mistakes in mind as you write and striving to avoid them , you’ll be able to elevate both your storytelling and character development and create natural-sounding dialogue that engages readers.

 

1.  Make each character sound different

A common pitfall for writers when crafting dialogue is making all their characters sound suspiciously similar. To provide your characters with distinctive voices and personality, you must first know them completely. How does your character talk? Do they come with any verbal quirks? How do they reply to other characters? How do they react to different events?

An excellent example is Jay Gatsby’s frequent use of “old sport” in dialogue in The Great Gatsby. This creates both a recognizable voice, distinct from other characters, but also reveals a facet of Gatsby’s character: that he’s attempting to impersonate ‘old money’ with his speech and lifestyle. Of course, you don’t want to overdo catchphrases, but having recognizable traits in dialogue can help readers build a clearer image of each separate character as well as implicitly show elements of their personalities, in a classic case of “show, don’t tell.”

A good method for when you start to develop unique voices for each of your characters is to consider their backgrounds, personalities, and experiences. These details can help inform choices in relation to the distinctiveness of your character’s tone, vocabulary, and sentence structure. Here is a list of recommendations for crafting different characters through dialogue.

  • Unique qualities: Explore each character’s background, motivations, and quirks. Use these unique experiences and perspectives within their dialogue.
  • Dialogue flow: Sentence structure and word choice are important. Varying sentence length, different contractions and slang are appropriate for different characters to illustrate their personalities.
  • Show, don’t tell: Dialogue should be used to reveal character, not just exposition. Their words, hesitations, and reactions can be used to show character differences.

 

2.  Punctuation is crucial

As you’ll likely know if you’ve ever taken a writing course, punctuation is key when writing dialogue. Without perfectly accurate punctuation, it becomes challenging for readers to follow which characters are talking at what time and in what manner. There are several rules to follow when writing dialogue, but here are a few pointers:

  • Change paragraphs for every speaker. In order for readers to easily follow the flow of a conversation, it is important to start a new paragraph every time the speaker changes.
  • Put commas and full stops inside the quote. This is a common punctuation mistake but the general rule of thumb is to keep both full stops and commas within the quotation marks.
  • Bear in mind regional styles. British English generally favors single quotation marks while for American English, the standard is double quotation marks.

 

3.  A balance of dialogue tags

Dialogue tags are the words used to indicate who is speaking and provide context for the spoken words within dialogue. The most commonly used dialogue tag is ‘said,’ yet writers often use an assortment of verbs to add variety and convey the tone in which the dialogue is delivered.

However, a problem with dialogue can be the overuse of ‘said’ as the dialogue tag, which can obscure the way something is said from the readers.

Instead of relying entirely on ‘said’ as your only dialogue tag throughout your writing, here are several engaging alternatives:

  • Whispered
  • Barked
  • Sighed
  • Pleaded
  • Declared
  • Asserted
  • Mumbled

These alternatives can enrich your dialogue by providing additional emotion for readers to experience a more intimate understanding of your characters’ feelings, perspectives, and reactions.

 

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‘Said’ remains king

 

That being said, use these alternatives to a reasonable extent. ‘Said’ has remained king because it’s unpretentious and unobtrusive, and lets readers focus their attention entirely on the dialogue itself. For many writers, it’s more important for your characters’ words and actions to convey the mood themselves.

In other words, it’s important to switch between ‘said’ and its alternatives in a balanced way. For more advice on how to use dialogue tags effectively, have a look at this excellent post.

 

4. Avoid excessive exposition

Dialogue can be a great, subtle approach to accomplish  exposition — in other words slowly share key background information that is necessary for readers to understand the events of the current story. However, characters providing too much background information through dialogue at once can feel unnatural and forced. (“Margaret, my third cousin, it has been seven years since we last met!” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.)

Characters saying “as you know” to each other all the time can be frustrating. These are unrealistic conversations where both characters know something that the reader doesn’t, so the dialogue exists only for the benefit of the reader.

 

How to provide exposition well

Of course, it’s perfectly fine to use dialogue to reveal expositional information, however, it should be integrated seamlessly into the conversation. Relevant details should ideally be revealed gradually throughout the story rather than in long monologues or unnatural explanations. This allows your readers to piece together an image themselves rather than roll their eyes at being spoon-fed everything they need to know at once through exposition.

 

When revealing exposition through dialogue, subtlety is key, or you risk the common mistake of the exposition dump. Having two knowledgeable characters argue about a topic is one handy way to let useful information slip, provided the argument is concise enough you don’t lose the reader..

 

If it sounds like you’ve made any of these dialogue mistakes before, don’t freak out! Make sure you take on board the advice in this blog, read the other articles linked, and keep trying to improve by studying other writers — good luck!

 

 

Rose Atkinson-Carter is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects authors with the world’s best self-publishing resources and professionals like editors, designers, and ghostwriters. She lives in London.