Readers forgive a lot. A slow opening. A subplot that wanders. Two pages describing a kitchen. What they rarely forgive is dialogue that sounds like two people reading their own CVs aloud. Most of the errors new novelists make in fictional conversation are editing problems rather than talent problems, which means they can be fixed. Here are the ones that come up most often.
Dialogue that explains instead of reveals
Stilted speech almost always starts in the same place: the writer needs the reader to know something, and a character gets volunteered to say it.
‘As you know, Margaret, we have been married for thirty years and you have never liked my brother.’
Nobody speaks like that outside a badly staged play. Real conversation is partial. People interrupt, dodge, answer a different question, restart a sentence halfway through and leave the important half unsaid.
‘Tuesday,’ she said. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t remember Tuesday.’
The second version tells us less and lands harder. It gives the reader a job to do, which is exactly what you want.
A quick test
Read the line aloud to an imagined listener who already knows the facts. If it sounds absurd, either cut it or move that information into narration. Background belongs in the narrative; dialogue is for pressure, conflict and evasion.
Adverb overload and the said-bookism habit
When dialogue is doing its job, ‘said’ disappears from the page. When it is not, no adverb will rescue it.
- ‘she said angrily’ — the anger belongs in the words and the action beats, not the tag.
- She opined. He chortled. She interjected. These pull attention to the writing rather than the scene.
- Clusters of exclamation marks — one is a raised voice; three is a shrug from the reader.
- Tags where a beat would work — ‘she said, lighting a cigarette’ does two jobs badly. Try: ‘She lit a cigarette. “Fine.”’
Keep ‘said’ and ‘asked’. Both are invisible, which is their virtue. The occasional ‘whispered’ or ‘shouted’ is fine when volume genuinely matters and nothing else conveys it. Everything else is decoration.
When every character sounds the same
Take a page of your dialogue and delete the names. If you cannot tell who is speaking, the characters have no voices yet — they have yours.
Voice is built from specifics: vocabulary, sentence length, how much a person swears or hedges, what they refuse to discuss, how they dodge. Give each significant character one or two rules and apply them quietly.
- One never finishes a sentence when the subject turns emotional.
- One answers questions with questions.
- One uses an older relative’s stock phrases.
- One speaks in short, complete sentences; another circles.
You never have to explain these rules to the reader. Consistency will do the work for you.
Punctuation pitfalls for UK writers
British fiction convention differs from American style in ways that trip up anyone who reads widely across both. Decide on a system early, then apply it without exception.
Quotation marks
British publishing usually sets speech in single quotation marks, with double marks for quotations inside speech: ‘She told me, “Don’t wait up.”’ Some UK imprints prefer doubles throughout. Check your publisher’s house style, or your chosen style guide, and stay with it.
Punctuation and the closing mark
Terminal punctuation goes inside the quotation mark: ‘I’m leaving.’ If a dialogue tag follows, the comma goes inside too, and the tag stays lower case: ‘I’m leaving,’ he said. The tag belongs to the same sentence as the speech, not to a new one.
Dashes and ellipses
An interrupted line takes a dash, with no full stop after it: ‘I only wanted to—’ He held up a hand. A trailing, unfinished line takes an ellipsis: ‘I thought you might…’ Use both sparingly. Three dashes a page is plenty. Three in a paragraph usually means you are avoiding writing the rest of the sentence.
A new speaker gets a new paragraph
No exceptions, even in a fast exchange. A block of text shared by four speakers is hard work to read, however good the lines are.
Dialogue that says exactly what it means
If a character states their feelings plainly, the scene has nowhere to go. The energy in most good scenes comes from the gap between what is said and what is meant.
Picture two people arguing about whose turn it is to buy milk. The real problem is that one of them has been offered a job in Aberdeen. Written straight, the scene is a domestic squabble. Written with the milk kept at the centre and Aberdeen kept out of reach, it becomes tense, sad and quietly funny — and the reader feels the real subject without being told.
Try this: draft the scene once as a blunt argument in which everyone states their feelings in plain language. Then rewrite it, deleting every sentence that names an emotion. Keep what survives.
Rewriting exercises that actually work
- Read it aloud, standing up. Anything you stumble over gets cut or changed. Anything you would never say to another person gets rewritten. This catches more faults than any rule in a style guide.
- Strip the tags. Delete every ‘he said’ and ‘she asked’ from a scene. If it still reads clearly, you have written it well. Add back only the tags a reader genuinely needs.
- Write it as a transcript. No tags, no beats, no description — just the lines, one per speaker. You will hear the rhythm, or the lack of it, immediately.
- Cover the names. Hand the page to someone who has not read the book and ask them to say who is speaking. If they cannot, go back to voice.
Putting it into practice
Take one chapter, ideally one you have already revised twice. Read only the dialogue, skipping everything between it, and listen for repetition, sameness and lines that exist purely to pass on information. Then read the chapter aloud in full, mark the places your own ear catches, and check every quotation mark, dash and comma against one style guide rather than five.
Do that and your conversations will start doing the work dialogue is meant to do: carrying conflict, revealing character and making the reader want to turn the page. Get the speech right and readers will forgive the overlong kitchen description. Get it wrong and no plot will save you.
Photo: AgnieszkaMonk / Pixabay
