How to Write More Natural Dialogue
Nine reasons why your dialogue isn’t quite right and how to fix them — with examples.
Just for the sake of clarity — we’ll define dialogue as at least two characters speaking to each other. Out loud. There’s also interior monologue and nonverbal dialogue. But we’ll save those for another day.
So. You have two or more characters. And they’re speaking to each other. The goal is to write their dialogue so that it sounds natural to the reader’s inner ear.
In other words, your dialogue should read like real people are really talking. There’s some intuition involved in writing natural dialogue. But it’s learned intuition.
You’ll get better at this the more you do it.
Why do we need natural dialogue anyway?
When we read fiction (or narrative nonfiction), we enter a head space that is sometimes called the narrative dream. This is where the real world falls away and we’re fully immersed in the story.
If you’ve ever looked up from a book and realized that you’ve been reading for hours and you have no idea where the time went — you’ve experience being deep in the narrative dream.
