Dialogue is where readers decide whether to trust a writer. They will forgive a slow first chapter, a street described a shade too vaguely, a plot twist that creaks a little. But a line of speech that sounds like nobody who has ever lived will pull them out of the story in half a sentence.
Editors spend much of their week marking the same handful of problems in dialogue. None of them are about talent. They are habits, and habits can be broken. Here are the five that come up most often, and how to fix each one.
1. Characters explaining things they both already know
This is the most common fault in unpublished fiction, and once you know what you are looking for, it is almost impossible to miss.
"As you know, Inspector, the mill closed after the fire in 1987, back when your father ran the place."
Nobody talks like that. The sentence exists only to tell the reader something, and both speakers are being made to carry the author's luggage. Readers feel the strain immediately, even if they cannot name it.
The fix is to find the one person in your cast who genuinely does not know, and let them ask. Better still, let the information surface through consequence: a locked gate, an unpaid debt, a name that makes someone change the subject. Underline every fact in a scene of dialogue. If both speakers already know it, cut it or move it somewhere else.
2. Everyone sounds the same
Cover the names on a page of dialogue and read it again. If you cannot tell who is speaking, neither can your reader. This is the single fastest test of voice, and it takes under a minute.
Voice comes from vocabulary — the words a person reaches for and the ones they would never use — along with sentence length, what they notice, and what they refuse to discuss. A surgeon and a teenager can both be terse, but they will be terse differently.
On accents
Resist phonetic spelling. Dropped letters and apostrophes grow exhausting within a paragraph and often read as mockery. Rhythm and word order do the work instead. Compare "He's not coming, then" with "So he's not coming." Same information, different person.
Try this exercise: two characters, nothing much at stake, disagreeing about something small — whether to take the bus, what to have for dinner. Write a page with no dialogue tags at all. If the reader can still follow who is speaking, you have voices on the page.
3. Small talk and throat-clearing
"Hello, Jane. How are you?" "I'm fine, thank you. And you?" "Very well, thanks. Would you like a cup of tea?" "Yes, please. That would be lovely."
There is nothing wrong with that exchange grammatically. There is nothing alive in it either. People who know each other skip the formalities; people who dislike each other use them as weapons. Either way, the pleasantries are rarely the scene.
Enter late. Cut the first three lines and see whether anything is lost — usually it is not. And remember that people rarely answer the question they were asked. Ask "Where were you last night?" and the reply might be "You've been talking to my brother." That is a better line, because it tells us something about the relationship as well as the plot.
4. Tags and adverbs doing the heavy lifting
"I never wanted this," he said bitterly. The adverb is telling the reader how to feel, which means the line itself is not doing its job. Either write a line that carries the bitterness on its own, or let an action beat do it.
Mostly, use said and asked. They are invisible in a way that chortled and opined never will be. Then vary the rhythm with physical business instead of tags:
She set the cup down. "I never wanted this."
Four things to check on every revision pass
- Adverbs propping up weak lines — angrily, sarcastically, sadly. Cut them and see if the line survives.
- Exotic tags. If a character cannot retort or exclaim without you noticing the verb, use said.
- Action beats that defy physics. Nobody nods, shrugs or smiles their way through a full sentence. Break the beat off with a full stop, not a comma.
- A tag on every single line. Once two speakers are established, leave a run of lines bare and let the reader keep up.
5. Nobody interrupts, nobody lies
Dialogue that is too tidy is dialogue that has stopped being convincing. Real speech overlaps, doubles back, gets cut off, goes quiet. Characters with something to hide do not answer directly, and characters who are furious do not wait politely for their turn.
Read a scene aloud and mark the places where a real person would cut in. Then let them. An em dash handles interruption; an ellipsis handles a voice trailing off. Use both sparingly, and never in the same line.
The deeper issue is subtext. Two people discussing the weather while actually arguing about an affair is doing more work than two people frankly discussing the affair. If every character says exactly what they mean every time, the scene has nowhere left to go. Let some questions go unanswered. Silence is a response.
A quick revision pass
When a dialogue scene is not working, run it through these steps in order.
- Read it aloud, standing up, playing both parts. Your ear catches what your eye forgives.
- Cut the first two lines and the last line. Most scenes lose nothing and gain pace.
- Cover the character names. Can you still tell who is speaking?
- Count the adverbs attached to your tags. Keep one or two, delete the rest.
- Ask what each character wants in the scene and what they are hiding. If both want the same thing and say so plainly, rewrite.
Dialogue improves faster than any other element of craft, largely because you can test it instantly. Say the line out loud. If it makes you wince, the problem is not the character — it is the sentence. Cut it, tighten it, and try again.
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