Dialogue post #1

Let’s talk about dialogue!

Dialogue is tricky.

The first thing that you need to understand is that your characters need to talk like actual human beings. Most people—and this is important, so listen—Most people use contractions in their speech. Most people use some sort of slang in their speech. Most people do not sound like robots.
So don’t write something like this:

”There is not a goose in that room that is over there,” she said, “I am serious for sure.”

Here are some ways you can write that line more naturally:

”There isn’t a goose in that room there,” she said, “I’m serious for sure.”

“There’s not a goose in that room,” she said, “I’m sure.”

“There isn’t a goose in that room over there, dammit,” she said, “I’m so serious motherfucker.”

And so on.
Of course it will vary depending on the character, and if you want to emphasize that a person is very awkward or robot-like, removing contractions works. Fawful doesn’t use contractions, for example… but then again, there are a lot of things weird about his dialogue.

Look, the thing here is that you need to listen to yourself talking. Say a line out loud. Sometimes I’ll hear people reading their writing out loud, and where in the text they used a “it is” or “I am”, out loud they say “it’s” or “I’m” because it was too awkward. If they realize this well enough to read it like that, why can’t they just write it like that?

Another tip is to listen to other people talking. It’s so strange, sometimes you can talk to dozens of people every day, people who talk in wildly different ways, but not actually notice how they’re speaking. So concentrate a little more, when you’re with your friends, on what they say to you and how they say it. And, as weird as this sounds, listen to strangers. Eavesdrop. Note their word choice, sentence structure, etc. Listen to people of different occupations, backgrounds. Compare an English professor to a redneck. Compare a college student to a grandma. People talk in lots of different ways, and it helps to understand those different dialects.