Janice Hardy’s latest blog posts offers advice for writing dialogue that doesn’t bring your readers to tears. “Badly written dialogue makes it hard for readers to connect to the characters,” she says. “The characters don’t feel like real people. It’s hard to understand what’s going on, because the dialogue is obfuscating instead of enlightening. And the worst part—it just bad writing, and who wants to read that?”
She identifies five ways bad dialogue can kill your novel:
- Characters make speeches, not conversations. When a character explains a situation and summarizes how they feel about it, you’re writing exposition, not dialogue. Sometimes a character will ask a leading question to prompt this kind of lecture.
- The entire scene is one big game of tag. Too many dialogue tags upends your rhythm and weighs down your dialogue. Instead, use occasional tags and some stage direction to indicate who is talking, Hardy suggests. Even a few small changes will noticeably improve your sentence flow.
- People don’t really talk like that. In amateur writing, “characters are overly formal and speak in perfect sentences, often without contractions, and they frequently sound like they were written with a thesaurus,” Hardy says. “Natural speech is more conversational, with sentence fragments and contractions. Think about how people in that scene and situation would really talk.”
- Nobody stands still. While you can use stage direction to break up dialogue and avoid the overuse of tags, it’s possible to overdo it, Hardy says. You don’t need to describe a character’s every footstep.
- There are way too many people in the room. “Carrying on a conversation with more than three or four people is awfully hard to do well, especially if readers aren’t already familiar with the speakers,” Hardy says. “You often wind up adding way too many dialogue tags or stage direction to help differentiate characters, so the entire scene gets clunky and drags.”
