Let's Talk: The Art & Craft of Dialogue

Good dialogue is a delight to read. Bad dialogue is deadly. -Stephen King

Of the many aspects of fiction writing — character development, plot, description, scene structure — dialogue writing is often considered one of the trickiest. I am lucky, I suppose, in that it’s an aspect I find relatively easy. I can tie myself up in knots over how to move from Scene 1 to Scene 2, but dialogue flows for me and is pleasurable to write. Unfortunately, for those who struggle with it, bad dialogue is easier to spot than other writing bugaboos, and is especially likely to make a reader turn away from a book. I read an interview with an agent who said dialogue is her primary litmus test. With each manuscript she receives, she skips straight to the first bit of dialogue, and if it’s bad—off to the slush pile it goes.

Lesson: it’s really worth brushing up on your dialogue-writing skills.

Why is dialogue so important? It’s fast moving, keeping readers engaged where long chunks of text will lose them. Dialogue visually breaks up a page, adding necessary white space. Writers can use dialogue to efficiently deliver exposition. Dialogue reveals character better than description, and often better than action. Dialogue is, when done correctly, fun to read. And if you don’t have a knack for it, never fear: it’s not magic. It’s a skill that improves with study and practice. The easiest thing to get wrong is also the simplest thing to fix: formatting. Hardly any articles, blog posts, or book chapters on writing deal with the mechanics of dialogue, which is a shame. Because very few beginning writers get it right — and they’re going to get rejected by agents. Let’s fix that.

Wrong:
She said:
“You’re formatting this dialogue incorrectly.”

Better:
She said: “You’re formatting this dialogue incorrectly.”

Still better:
She said, “You’re formatting this dialogue incorrectly.”

Best:
“You’re formatting this dialogue incorrectly,” she said.

Keep dialogue on the same line as the dialogue tag. (“Dialogue tag” is the “he said” part — more on this later.) See how the first example above had a paragraph return between the tag and the quote? That’s incorrect. Furthermore, do not use colons in your tags, and avoid starting with the tag. Note the final, “best” example. The speech ends with 1. a comma, 2. a close-quotation mark, and 3. a lowercase “she said.” This is the default, at least for American English. This is what you should be doing most of the time; obviously there are exceptions to these rules. Don’t think you can get away with the exceptions, though, until you’ve understood and mastered the rules. If you think you’ve mastered them already, do a quick check. I mean, really, right now: go look. Find a section of your own dialogue and note whether you are mostly sticking to the default — and when you have departed from it, ask yourself if you did so deliberately and consciously for a particular effect. Based on the number of first drafts I have looked over, and based on my own learning curve, I’d guess there’s some brushing up to be done.

Many dialogue rules are picked up intuitively by writers who do a lot of reading. If you are getting feedback that you’re formatting incorrectly, you may not be reading enough, or you may be reading stories with bad dialogue. I find the best way to train my writerly intuition is not to study the formal rules, but to find writers who do it well and literally copy them: pick up a book by one of these authors  and copy out dialogue-intensive passages. I will continue to repeat this advice, because I truly believe transcribing is one of the best tools to improve your fiction. Transcribing is an exercise that rewires your writing brain on a level much deeper than rule-memorizing will ever do.

“Do not,” hollered the editor, “ever have your characters holler scream, whisper, or moan what they could just say!”
The use and abuse of dialogue tags, beyond what I discuss above, is more subject to controversy. First, there’s the question of “said.” Most editors agree that this tag is preferable to any other tag, such as “shouted” or “sighed.” This latter kind of tag is called a said bookism, and editors hate those. Unfortunately, elementary-school teachers have for decades instructed students to avoid “said” and instead use bookisms, so a lot of us have to be retrained to go back to good old “said.” The reason editors recommend “said” is that it is less colorful: bookisms are terribly distracting, and interrupt the flow of dialogue. You can use them occasionally to break up the steady march of “he saids,” but you want “said” to predominate.

Almost as loathed as said bookisms are adverbial dialogue tags: “Take that!” she said scornfully. This is one I have a harder time avoiding, as I do love me my adverbs. We are told time and time again to keep our adverbs to a minimum, but they keep creeping back into tags — at least, into mine. Often these tags are redundant, as we can tell from the context how the speaker is speaking. If you don’t think it’s clear, consider finding another way to evoke the mood.

“You can also leave off tags entirely.”
“How do you know who’s speaking, then?”
“Let readers sort it out from context.”
It’s fine to skip tags occasionally when you’ve got a long page of dialogue; you don’t need “he said” after every line. Some schools of thought go further and treat tags as if they were volatile little bombs: icky things you use only when absolutely necessary. You know these authors: you flip open a book and it’s just this endless wall of dialogue. You have to go back three pages to sort out who’s speaking, and then count lines to keep track. Cormac McCarthy not only does this, but foregoes quotation marks altogether. Hint: unless you are Cormac McCarthy, do not write dialogue like Cormac McCarthy. Use dialogue tags. And punctuation.

To move from the abstract to the concrete, let’s take a look at some dialogue from an actual published novel. I’ll flip open Lorrie Moore’s novel A Gate At the Stairs, because it’s chock full of excellent examples:

“So,” said Mrs. McKowen, “have you met the birth mother?”
“Yes,” said Sarah.
“And you’re sure you want that woman’s child?”
Edward began to cough. “Excuse me—is there a bathroom I might use?”
“Why do you say that about the birth mom?” asked Sarah.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. McKowen. “I guess, well, the lady’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.”

In the first sentence, we see how Moore uses the dialogue tag in the middle of the sentence: this is my own preferred way to tag, at least for dialogue that’s longer than a dozen words or so. The second speaker, Sarah, has the default tag: statement, followed with a comma and simple “she said.” Edward arrives on the scene without a true dialogue tag, but rather introductory action: he does something on the same line as his dialogue, so we know he is the speaker: this is another good dialogue option, which you can use more frequently as the defaults become automatic for you. (Use a period, not a comma, in this construction.)

When Sarah speaks again, she gets the tag “asked Sarah” because it’s a question: notice that “asked” is lowercase. Many writers understand that “he said” is lowercase because they see the comma, but when there’s a question mark they mistakenly revert to capitalization. However, the formatting remains as if it were a comma: remember your defaults, which here is, “use lowercase with dialogue tags.”

Finally, the last line repeats the middle-of-the-sentence dialogue tag, with the default “she said” but in reverse. “Said” should generally be the second word in a tag, not first, but you can use this construction for variety.

Variety. Look how well Moore plays with the default. She shifts her tags around from beginning, to middle, to end, and back. Why? Because of flow. If you always place your dialogue tags at the end, your dialogue can sound programmed and monotonous. The default is a good one: dialogue tags at the end, stick with “he said,” but Moore shows how variation can ensure flow.

If you feel overwhelmed by the technicality of this explanation, don’t worry. You will pick it up intuitively if you study good dialogue. Remember, though, that you’ll get much more out of the masters if you copy out their work, word by word and comma by comma, than if you simply read it.


“I was thinking, um, that, well, maybe, you know—” The writer fiddled with her earrings.
The editor scowled. “Get to the point!”
“But this is, like, kinda, how people—how people, actually, you know, talk.”
“That nice,” he said. “But it’s not how writers should write.”
Drilling further down into style: There’s an irony of writing good dialogue, in that the most natural-sounding written dialogue is not much like actual speech. Read an exact transcript from a radio or television interview to see what I mean: note all the stammers, ums, self-interruptions, start-overs, and banalities. When I was a journalist and did interviews, I had to clean this sort of thing up for the final product; all journalists do this, which is why you don’t see “uhhh” and “I mean” in written interviews. You don’t see the stops and starts as the interviewee finds her point. This is even truer for fictional dialogue: Your characters should speak more economically than people actually do. The flipside of this is that dialogue shouldn’t be too clean. The grammar in dialogue can be incorrect, and should be incorrect when that’s true to your character. You can get away with “gonna” and “woulda” in dialogue; you can say, “Me and her gone shopping” if that’s how your character — say, a three-year-old — would speak. You clean up the distractions, the ums and stumbles; you don’t hide personality, age, or education. Here’s an example from John Steinbeck’s novel “Of Mice and Men”:

“Aw Lennie!” George put his hand on Lennie's shoulder. “I ain't takin' it away jus' for meanness. That mouse ain't fresh, Lennie; and besides, you've broke it pettin' it. You get another mouse that's fresh and I'll let you keep it a little while.”

George is a migrant worker with little formal education. Note that while his grammar is true to his character, Steinbeck has kept his speech economical. No unnecessary words are used. (Bonus points if you noticed that Steinbeck does not use a formal dialogue tag here, but uses a line of action to indicate the speaker, as Lorrie Moore had her character Edward do in the earlier excerpt.)

Not exactly Steinbeck, but really. Is this not fabulous dialogue?

In addition to Steinbeck, one of my favorite writers of dialogue is John Cheever, who manages to create sparkling characters with pinpoint use of dialogue. Let’s meet Mrs. DePaul, a character from John Cheever’s short story “Christmas Is A Sad Season for the Poor.”

“Oh, Charlie!” Mrs. DePaul was a stout woman with an impulsive heart, and Charlie’s plaint struck at her holiday mood as if she had been caught in a cloudburst. “I do wish we could share our Christmas dinner with you, you know,” she said. “I come from Vermont, you know, and when I was a child, you know, we always used to have a great many people at our table. The mailman, you know, and the schoolteacher, and just anybody who didn’t have any family of their own, you know, and I wish we could share our dinner with you the way we used to, you know, and I don’t see any reason why we can’t.” 

She carries on like this for another few sentences. Her repeated use of the phrase “you know” is as much a representation of her character as her stoutness and her impulsive heart. It gives us a quick, intense impression of her, like a black-and-white photograph with a few details colored in. The repeated phrase would be maddening in a novel if she were a primary character, but Mrs. DePaul is a sketch. Cheever can use this device with her because this is a short story, and she only has a few lines. Another dialogue-savvy author I’d recommend is Flannery O’Connor. When I do my transcribing exercises, I usually pick Flannery. (I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence that these writers are both from the mid-20th century: perhaps that was a heyday for dialogue writing.)

“I don’t know. It just started shuddering and then steam —” I began.
“Eee, cabron, I told you she was a girl!” the woman shouted at her husband, interrupting. “Sorry, mija,” she added to me. The man stepped back, looked me over skeptically, shrugged, then went back under the hood.
Ready to drill a little deeper? The next step is to get your dialogue to perform multiple functions. In the above excerpt, from one of my works-in-progress, the viewpoint character is dealing with a broken-down car, and the dialogue appears to be focused on that. But if I did it right, I also let the reader know that this setting is not your typical American setting and that the point-of-view character is a girl who looks like a boy. We also can see that in spite of being a tomboy, the viewpoint character doesn’t know cars,  that the shouting woman is kinder to strangers than she is to her husband, and that the husband is not much of a talker. My intention was to pack a lot of information into a small bit of dialogue—without the reader noticing what I was doing.

Your characters will sound wooden if you give their dialogue only one job, especially if that job is “transfer info to reader.” Your characters are not robots. They are, or should seem like, real people. They need dimension. As your character delivers plot information to the reader, she should also be delivering other subtextual information, such as her personality (is she bubbly? Clipped?), her relationship with the person to whom she’s speaking (does she love him? Fear him?), and her reaction to the events around her (is she excited? Bored?). As you add these layers, you’re going to find yourself excited at how real your dialogue suddenly sounds. Your characters will have more life than you’ve ever given them. One exercise you can do right now is to look over a few pages of your dialogue and rework it to reflect the speaker’s unique personality. Look at the Moore excerpt above: See what Edward is doing? He coughs, then tries to flee the room. He is startled by the previous comment, and uncomfortable with conflict. We learn a lot about Edward from this tiny bit of dialogue.

As much as I’ve covered here, I’ve only touched on the basics of writing dialogue. Entire books are written on the subject; courses are taught. You can read the books, you can sign up for the courses; you can memorize everything I’ve written here. But if you want to write dialogue that sings, that will grab the attention of every agent out there, read the works of excellent writers. Read closely. Transcribe, and while copying out their work, notice what they are doing. Think about what they were thinking about when they chose those words. Smoke that stuff, get it into your bloodstream, into your DNA, and it will become your own. You’ll have the skills to let your own voice — what is uniquely yours — come through.

Jan Švankmajer, "Dimensions in Dialogue"

No Way Out

A friend asked me the other day if there’s one recurring theme I return to in my fiction. That is a hard question to answer (try it!). After some thought, I decided that “the moral dilemma” is something I find incredibly appealing in storytelling … both as a creator and consumer.

To be clear, when I speak of “moral dilemma,” I do not mean “controversial political issue.” The two are often conflated. A moral dilemma is a situation where every alternative available breaks a moral rule. Your character has to take some action, but there is no “good” action to take. If structured well, the reader will feel the pain of the terrible choice, and will leave the scene or story wondering what she would have done. The more anguished the character, the more powerful the story. The reader and the writer alike are left as unsettled as the character, and the story becomes unforgettable.

Reaching far back in world literature, we have the wretched decision faced by Abraham in the Old Testament. God instructs him to slay his own son, Isaac. Abraham has exactly two unpleasant alternatives: ignore God (and, hello! disobey the creator of the universe!) or kill his own child.

Agamemnon and Iphigenia

Abraham wasn’t the only one confronted with such a decision: the gods of many cultures are fond of putting their people in this particular pickle. Poor Agamemnon, for example: Zeus orders the warrior to lead an expedition to Troy to punish that city. En route, a storm breaks out that endangers the quest; Agamemnon is ordered by the goddess Artemis to slay his own daughter as a sacrifice, at which point the gods will stop the storm. If he does not slay his daughter, everyone on the ship (including his daughter, natch) will die. Ags also will be disobeying Zeus: if he does not murder his daughter, Troy will not be revenge-sacked. The flipside is obvious, and the same as Abraham's: he will have murdered his own child, one of the deepest taboos across time and culture. No good choice.

World mythology is full of people sacrificing their offspring to the gods, but in the case of Tantalus, the gods didn’t appreciate the act. He killed his son in offering to the Olympians, and for this he is eternally punished: he is sent to Hades, to stand forever in a pool of cool water with fresh fruit dangling above his head. When he is thirsty and bends to drink the water, it recedes from his lips. When he is hungry and reaches for the fruits, they retreat from his grasp. A miserable situation, all right: but not a moral dilemma. It’s good to keep in mind that being trapped or stuck is not necessarily the same as a moral dilemma — though it can increase the tension and pace of a story.

Stephen Blackpool and his burden

In Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, hardworking Stephen Blackpool is saddled with a wretched, drunken wife. He and his wife are estranged, and since then he's (chastely) fallen in love with another woman, the angelic Rachael. He desperately wants to obtain a divorce, but due to the class-biased divorce laws of the time, he cannot. One night, he comes home to find the wife back in his flat, drunk and aggressive. As she passes into semiconsciousness, he notices there are two bottles on the nightstand: one is alcohol, the other is poison. The wife wakes up blearily and reaches for the poison. Stephen is faced with a terrible moral dilemma here: allow the wife to poison herself, thus ridding him of his burden, or save her.

I know what I would have done. As I was reading along, I wanted to yell at him, “Let her drink the poison! Come on, Stephen!” Dickens masterfully draws out the scene, ratcheting up the tension, drawing you into Stephen’s agonized state of mind. (For the resolution, turn to the chapter entitled “Rachael.”)

Which child will you choose?

The classic moral dilemma in modern fiction is Sophie’s Choice. Written by William Styron in 1979, the story revolves around a young mother in a Polish concentration camp who must choose which of her two children will die. You don’t have to be a mother to feel the horror of this impossible decision. (But every mother who knows the story feels a particular knot of agony.)

Continuing forward in time, we have perhaps the current reigning queen of the ethical dilemma, Jodi Picoult. Her novel My Sister’s Keeper has the protagonist caught between continuing on as her sister’s bone-marrow donor, or seizing control of her own destiny and refusing to be part of her parents’ plans anymore. In addition to the grueling choice faced by the main character (it’s ethically muddier than it even sounds), you are also presented with the initial decision made by the parents: is it ethical to conceive a child for the sole purpose of becoming a bone-marrow donor for her sick sister?

In Erin Morgenstern’s magical, literary genre-bender, The Night Circus, young magicians Celia and Marco are caught up in a competition than lands them both in an ethical dilemma. The bad guy has set them up to choose between their love for each other and their own survival. Sound familiar? It’s quite similar to the situation faced by Katniss and Peeta in The Hunger Games: you love each other, but only one of you will get out of this alive. Hmmm, what to do, what to do.

One key to a good moral dilemma is that the writer and the reader feel just as torn as the character. Too often, writers think they are setting up a moral dilemma, when it’s clear they have a “right” answer in mind. An example would be the teen novel which has the girl choosing between the handsome-schmucky rich guy and another guy who’s not so rich or popular, but is obviously the better pick. See: virtually every John Hughes movie ever made. Writers should be alert for this easy-out, and work to ensure that the dilemma is real. You don’t know, and you don’t want your readers to know, what is the right thing to do.

What sacrifices will a mother make?

In one of my current WIPs, my protagonist is a young, extremely impoverished mother whose baby has been snatched by a wealthy woman. The rich woman hopes to pass off the child as her own, in order keep her husband married to her: he is married solely for the sake of acquiring an heir. He’ll dump any wife who doesn’t provide, and no wife has been able to provide thus far (shades of Henry VIII). The young mother eventually tracks down her child, without really thinking about what she’ll do when she finds him. Does she take him back, to live with her in the streets? Or does she leave him in his new home, where he stands to inherit an estate and a title? I think that's a genuinely difficult decision, especially when I take into consideration the setting and some other extenuating circumstances.

Ideally, however you resolve the moral dilemma your character faces, the character should change as a result. One of the most important signs of real adulthood is the relinquishing of a black-and-white worldview. It’s comforting to think that every question has a clear right-or-wrong answer, and many stunted adults still cling to this childish notion. But a developed person (and character) understands that many choices are far from straightforward, and that clarity is rare. A satisfying story can show a character moving through the moral dilemma and coming out wearier but wiser: able to approach life with a more nuanced view. Another possibility is that the character is simply ruined by the dilemma. Sophie, of Sophie’s Choice, is such a character: she never recovers from the devastation inflicted on her. Faust is another classic example: he is offered a deal with the devil: give me your soul, and in exchange I give you unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasure. Tough choice, and it does him in.

What are your favorite moral-dilemma stories? Do you try to work those into your own writing? Can you think of other examples of characters ennobled — or ruined ‚ by the decisions they face?