26. 9 Tips to Write Sparkling Dialogue

In this episode, Suzy dives into one of the most critical yet often mishandled aspects of writing: dialogue. She shares her top tips for crafting dialogue that grabs your reader's attention, reveals character, and propels your story forward. Whether you struggle with punctuation, pacing, or making conversations feel authentic yet engaging, this episode will transform how you write dialogue.

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Transcript

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Welcome to Show, don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction, non fiction that are going to wow your readers broken down, step by step. We're going to explore. I'm going to explore writing techniques, I'm going to show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers careers that you wouldn't have access to otherwise, and I'm also going to coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you're just starting out, you're drafting your first book, you're editing, or you're currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show is going to help you unlock the writing skills that you didn't even know you needed, but you definitely do. I'm I'm so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers, so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams. And you're going to also have some fun doing it. Let's dive in. Every writer wants to write riveting dialogue, and many think they do. Yet, it's hands down the place where I see the most mistakes when reviewing writers drafts of books. Table stakes. Punctuation? Yes. Also, not using this tool to its full potential. The tool being dialogue. I see dialogue that's too sparse. Dialogue that's boring. Dialogue that's flat. Dialogue that's full of info dumps. And Dialogue that has me scratching my head and skimming ahead a couple pages until the book gets going again. If you don't want your dialogue to bore your readers, this episode is for you, because I'm going to dive into my best tips and give you some never before publicly shared guidelines to drag your readers into your dialogue and make them feel like they're really there, which is what this podcast is all about. This show don't tell, right? You're gonna learn more about dialogue in this episode than you even knew existed, so grab a paper and a pen, take some notes, because you're gonna want to look at all your scenes where you've got dialogue, and start tweaking them as soon as you're done listening. Ready to get excited about sparkling dialogue? Let's do this. Okay, tip number one. I want to address dialogue punctuation really briefly, though it's not the focus of this podcast. I want to share so much more because even for seasoned writers, the punctuation that we use in books for dialogue is kind of strange and seems to defy all logic. That's right. I said it. It's weird. So if you get corrections back from an editor and you're pulling out your hair, thinking, Oh my gosh, I thought I was really good at grammar and how am I not getting this? And thinking it all seems random and arbitrary, you're not alone. That happened to me, too, when I first started writing books, and it really, really annoyed me. Most writers get dialogue punctuation wrong, at least some of the time. Why? The rules are kind of tricky. And they require you to understand some things that you've probably never even thought about before, but you're gonna learn them today. I promise you, the rules are not actually arbitrary, and once you see the pattern, you'll be fine. The best way that I've found to teach this is to make sure that you understand the difference between a dialogue tag, which is he said, she said, they said, he asked, they asked, she replied. Difference between that and an action beat. Now that sounds kind of boring. There's a cheat sheet. You can download it. It's in the show notes. And so download that cheat sheet. I'm just going to go through it briefly, and then we're going to talk about all the other ways that you can make your dialogue slowly sparkle. For the complete grammar rules and acceptable punctuation formats for this dialogue, download the free cheat sheet from the show notes. There was a time when I was first writing books when I couldn't figure this out. And then I noticed that there was one way I was doing it that was consistently not being corrected by my editor and so I started doing it that way. And then I had this really gracious editor that came along and was like, Why is every single snippet of dialogue in your entire manuscript identical? And I was like, well, because that's the only way I knew how to do it. So I had to figure out all the ways, they're all there, take a look there and make sure that it's all cleared out. Here's the gist of it. Dialogue tags are used to indicate who's speaking. So dialogue, you know, I'm going to say this one. Quotation mark. Open quotation mark. Dialogue punctuation is the worst, Susie. I am pulling out my hair. Close quotation mark. The listener said. So notice in this sentence that there's a dialogue tag. The listener said. This is all part of the same sentence. Dialogue punctuation is the worst, Susie. I'm pulling out my hair, the listener said. All the same sentence. Therefore, you can use a comma between the sentence and the dialogue tag, so after the word hair. Dialogue tags are so boring, and they're meant to be. So, stick to the basics is the current standard in publishing. Said, replied, and asked for great. Maybe the occasional, she whispered, if you must. Don't get creative. Don't let other people tell you to get creative because it isn't what is done in the industry. Leave the, she shouts, he inquires, they exclaimed on the cutting room floor because they're, make your writing sound amateur. Adult readers actually skip over these quickly as they read, and the creative ones will only trip them up. In fact, you don't need dialogue tags at all. Now, a word of caution as I give this advice. Please don't go and delete every dialogue tag in your manuscript because you're going to end up with a mess where you can't tell who's talking and it's not going to work. Instead, see if you can replace each of your dialogue tags with an action beat where you can show what the speaker is up to. See the cheat sheet for how to do this successfully, but I highly recommend taking the time to eliminate as many dialogue tags as you can, replacing them with action beats, because not only does it keep your reading level higher, but it also eliminates unnecessary words, leaving more space in your book for, you guessed it, beautiful showing details that will help your readers connect with your characters and your world. And who doesn't want that? Note, there is an exception to this advice that I'm giving about deleting or replacing your dialogue tags. If you are writing for a lower reading level, such as middle grade books or lower YA, you're going to want to leave the dialogue tags in, even those creative ones. Newer readers read more slowly, and they don't skip those dialogue tags the way that adults do. In fact, they need these tags to show them who's speaking and help them interpret your scene. If you're writing for upper YA, sort of that 14 plus category, or adult, you're good to go. Okay, so that cheat sheet will clear up any confusion you have about punctuation. Learn it and apply it, because although a strong editor can clean this up for you if you do it wrong, it's super tedious work. And if your characters are written well, your readers, even your editors, gonna hear their voices in their heads as they read, making it really hard for them to pay attention to the punctuation and correct it all for you. I do this in my own manuscripts, it's really hard to find those mistakes later because I can hear the characters voices. So you'll also pay too much to have someone else Do that work that you're capable of doing yourself, so correct all your dialogue if you can. One more quick note about dialogue tags before I share with you the next eight amazing tips to make sparkling dialogue. The dialogue tags themselves, the he said, she said, they sound really redundant when narrated on an audiobook, which is supposed to be an identical copy of your print version, or they're not considered the same edition. Of course, there's a few exceptions to this rule. If you've got visuals in your book, but audio books are really fastly growing category and super profitable. So limiting your dialogue tags in books for teens and adults will help your readers experience when they listen to an audio book as well. Ugh, enough about grammar Susie already, right? So that's the basics on the grammar of the punctuation for dialogue and you need to master it. That's not the only issue I see with dialogue. How do you learn to make it sparkle? That's what we're going to talk about today. The worst advice that I hear out there, and I hear it all the time, passed from writing teachers to writers, and on to other writers, they talk about it in Facebook groups, or verbally, ugh, this advice, I just want to rip out my hair. Okay, the advice is, write your dialogue as closely to how people talk as possible. If you wanna learn how to do that, they advise to go to a coffee shop, an eavesdrop, writing down everything that people say so that it sounds realistic. Whew. Please, please, please, dear Writer, do not do this and expect your scenes to interest your readers. In fact, great dialogue in books rarely represents a whole conversation between characters. If you're writing your dialogue like this, your conversations are likely really long and drawn out. And we'll put your readers to sleep. So, before you smugly read back your transcript that you wrote down in a coffee shop, thinking, it's like I'm sitting right beside them, put your editing hat on and take another look. Anybody can write exactly what they hear. That takes zero skill. The skill that you, as a writer, bring to the table is knowing what to emphasize and how much to share. And that's gonna take practice. When I coach writers who are writing their own stories, for example, if they're writing a memoir or their own stories, I advise that they aren't sharing a journal of their birth to death with each day earning the same weight and emphasis in their book. Nobody would read that. Instead, they get to be the director of their own story. They can choose when to zoom in with their camera, in on a particular moment, when to pull the camera back for a montage, kind of gliding through it. The same advice is true for writing dialogue. In each scene that you have dialogue present, what do you need readers to think? What do you need readers to learn? What do you want readers to feel? To fit into your overall story and the experience that the reader will have, this is going to determine how much of the conversation readers actually need to witness. Put your reader hat on, put your reader lens on, and look at it from their point of view. Because the Mighty Dialogue is really, really, really important in fiction. It can convey so many things. Your dialogue should be doing double, triple duty all the time. It should be building your characters. It should be telling us or showing us about the world that they live in. You should react. Your dialogue is a really important piece of that. Dialogue in books, especially in fiction, isn't like real life. It just isn't. It would be very, very boring. Most conversations that we have with our neighbours and our friends, it's When we're talking about all the things that happen day to day, when we're hanging out with our family, they're pretty mundane. Think of your dialogue instead as a sparkling version of real life. Let each snippet of dialogue that you write do as much work as possible. Does what the characters say, or what they're saying in your scenes, does it reveal something about their personality? Does it tell you their motivation? Does it show their emotion? It should. Your dialogue can be so much better than what you overhear in a coffee shop. We want to write dialogue that is smarter, that is sharper, that is a crunchier version of real life. You don't want your dialogue to just move and plod along, right? Because that's boring. We want your dialogue to do that double, triple, quadruple duty. And if you can show us everything about your world, Making sure that everything relates to what you're trying to say with your book. See where I'm going with this? Don't just have throwaway dialogue to fill your pages. So when you're taking a look and revising your own pages, and you've got like long stretches of dialogue, and you're trying to evaluate, do I need them, or how can I tighten them up, I can promise you it can almost certainly be trimmed so that you don't bore your readers. Look for bits that aren't working hard, that aren't doing that double, triple, quadruple duty, and cut them. Unless your intent of that particular conversation is to show that the conversation is boring. If that's the case, you actually wanted us to witness a boring conversation, please keep it short. Less is more. Make your point, move on, or readers will move on anyway by skimming. And then you've lost them. Here are some specifics that you could look for that can almost always go. So, tip number two, we're gonna get into the tips of dialogue. We talked about punctuation, we just talked about the importance. Tip number two, skip the niceties. What do I mean by that? Well, let's listen to a snippet for a moment. Hi, I'm Susie. I'm Nick. Nice to meet you, Nick. Lovely day, isn't it? Okay, readers are going to assume that people say hello when they meet up. We're also going to assume that they are polite, so skip ahead. The same with goodbyes. When I was growing up, my mom watched soap operas. We watched them from like 12 to 5 or whatever, and usually I only got to see the ones after school, the young and the restless, and they I found it really strange that despite their extensive use of landline phones, right? These black slim line phones that they would answer, that would ring, and they would have these conversations. The characters never said goodbye. They'd say something like, thanks for letting me know. Click. And then hang up. If you haven't noticed this before, I might have wrecked this for you because you're going to see it in shows now. But every time I pointed out this anomaly when I was a kid to other people, I was met with blank stares. I guess, looking back, I was always destined to be an editor at that point in my life, but it bugged me. Guess what? Nobody else noticed. Because hellos and goodbyes are implied. I promise you, your readers won't notice either, and you can get rid of them. Get rid of saying their names, and get rid of hello, I'm so and so, and goodbye. If it helps you to tiptoe your way into a scene or out of a scene by having your characters make small talk and say those things, by all means, draft it that way. Don't stop the flow. But on your second draft, be ruthless. Zoom into dialogue as late as you possibly can in a scene. Show us the meat of it, the most interesting part, and then let them hang up without saying goodbye. Tip number three for making sparkling dialogue, skip the marisms. Well, um, uh, I don't know, right? We talk like this in real life, but your characters can't, because you guessed it, it is Boring. If you want to show a mannerism or that a character speaks in a particular way, use the rule of three. That means use the word twice in your character's dialogue, sort of close together near the beginning of the book. It's enough to create a pattern in your smart reader's minds. If they've done it twice, that's how they speak. Then bring it back at a third point in time in the future or later in the book as a punchline or in a critical moment. Your readers will still remember it and it will be really impactful. Anything more than this for these annoying little mannerisms or the ums and ahs for dialect will feel overdone. I'm going to talk about dialect in a minute as well. Tip number four for writing your sparkling dialogue, skip the prompting. What do I mean by this? I see this one all the time. Make sure that your dialogue is always showing something about your character's nature and have them say things that move the story forward and don't stop us in our tracks. I see this problem a lot when I'm editing. Somebody will come up to a character and be like, Are you okay? Yeah, I think I'm okay. Are you sure? Yes, I think I'm sure. That dialogue does absolutely nothing. That is your brain, as you're writing, pausing to think about what you should write next. It doesn't do anything. So have the character run up and say, Did the explosion hit any major arteries? That's way more interesting than, Are you okay? I think so. Are you okay? Yeah, I'm okay. If you've got that sort of back and forth, skip it. Try this one. The explosion hit a major artery. What did you say? My ears are still ringing from the blast. Hear that prompting? It hit a major artery. Now I'm repeating. What does that mean? It means he's gonna lose a lot of blood. Will he live? I don't know. There's somebody here that's prompting a character rather than just letting them get on with it. This is a frustrating back and forth that will slow the pace in a critical scene, especially if there's just been an explosion. It's probably a really cool moment. This exchange that I just read is 41 words. The actual dialogue itself. The explosion hit a major artery. What did you say? My ears are still ringing from the blast. It hit a major artery. What does that mean? It means he'll lose a lot of blood. Will he live? I don't know. 41 words. Try this instead. The explosion hit a major artery. Blood gushed through Rob's fingers as he pushed his hand against Matt's leg. Bart shook his head, his ears ringing. If Matt died, the secret would die with him. See how that exchange is way more targeted without the back and forth of the prompting, which is just wasted space? It's now only 35 words and we've learned way more about the scene. It's much more exciting. Besides eliminating the prompting, I did something else to this snippet of dialogue, which brings me to tip number five to make your dialogue sparkle. Mix it in with the other elements of writing. I teach that there are five elements in writing. Dialogue is one. And then you also have actions, reactions, inner thoughts, and setting. You can check out the article that I've dropped in this show notes, which I recently wrote for Writers Helping Writers, which talks in more detail about these five elements of writing and get a complete rundown of how to integrate these well for well rounded scenes. But the gist of it is, if you're leaning too heavily on one or two techniques or elements on a page of your book, your reader's brain isn't going to be stimulated, and they're going to get bored. So mix together three or more of these on a page. So in the above example about the explosion and the gushing artery, rather than trying to stuff everything into dialogue, The second example actually uses setting details, which is the hand and the gushing blood, reactions, Bart shaking his head, and Bart's inner thoughts about what will happen if Matt dies, which is way more engaging. So we've actually used four different elements there instead of just one. Technique or tip number six for writing sparkling dialogue, no info dumps. Okay, this is the Show Don't Tell Writing Podcast, and you've heard me talk about info dumps in the past. Info dumps are basically when you have like these huge amounts of information that are just spoon fed to your reader and they're super boring and they're hard to digest because it's like, here's a fact, and here's another fact, and here's another fact, and here's another fact, and it's not engaging, right? If you have big, important info being shared in large dialogue blocks, you still need to break it up. It's a huge misconception. That dialogue is always showing. So I hear writing teachers even giving this information all the time. Oh, if you want to break up a faux dum. Use dialogue instead. And so I get these manuscripts in or these books to edit and people have just put that information and had somebody talk for like a whole page or a whole paragraph or something. That doesn't help. It's still an info dump if, if somebody is delivering that information, even if it's dialogue. So. Use above point number five, which is to mix it up with the five elements of writing, or find a way to show the information instead of having a character relate it. Better even yet, bring us to that scene and show us what happened, rather than have somebody tell us about it after the fact, okay? If you're using dialogue to infodump, it's still telling great way to find that in your drafts is if somebody's got like more than four or five lines in a snippet of dialogue, it's probably too much. So break it out. Okay. All right, tip number seven for writing your sparkling dialogue is kind of related. Skip the recaps. What's a recap? Well, a recap would be like somebody telling us something after the fact, right? So that's going to be boring. It's probably going to be an info dump. Bring us to that moment instead, or find a way to show us what happened. Do a flashback, even. But also, it would also be when we've already witnessed something in a book, and then you have, you have to let another character know. And so you have this whole other scene. Where another character is telling, or where the character that just witnessed this or just experienced something is telling somebody else about it. So, the other character, the new character that's learning this information for the first time is like oohing and aahing and like surprised by this information and all these things, but guess what? That's not new information for your reader! They were there! They already witnessed this whole thing happening, and so what you've done is you've created a completely redundant scene. You're also creating the identical emotional rollercoaster that you were doing in the first time. We're just going to go through it the second time. Just because your other character needs to have that information, we cap it. Instead of bringing us to that moment and having all this dialogue. Which explains what happened in the other scene. Skip it! Joe filled Bob in on what happened in the battle. Bob was devastated. Like, if the reaction is all you want, then that's not a good showing one. Bob sparked ache from all the people lost, right? So, so we can actually just skip over that. That is one time when I do not suggest that you zoom in and use dialogue if you have scenes like that. You can, like, eliminate whole scenes. I see this all the time, especially, for whatever reason, a lot of times I see it in science fiction books, where we have this, because it's important to track. The writer is tracking who knows what, and they write whole scenes this way, but we don't need them. Skip them. Tip number eight to write sparkling dialogue, let characters voices be unique, right? What if each have their own voice? You don't want everybody in your book to sound the same, even if they're the same age, the same gender, same culture. They would also have lots of different life experiences, and make sure that you're reflecting that with how they speak. When your characters have goals, which they should have in your book. When they have agency, which means they have, they're going after their goals, and they're taking steps towards them. When you give them skills or a vocation, this technique or this tip is much easier to make them sound unique. So you might have to go and do a creative couple of pages for yourself. Please don't put this in your book. It's a, it's a creative exercise that you can do where you answer a bunch of questions about your character and give them a little bit of depth so that when they speak, it's Everything is sort of colored with their point of view. They can have little quirks and speech patterns and things that we all have in real life. Again, don't overdo the mannerisms. Revisit tip number three to see how to apply the rule of three to these. But let your characters be different, read them out loud if you're not sure, you'll be able to hear, is the cadence different, are the words that they use different, that is going to make it really interesting. So give them their own flair or way of speaking, follow everything they say with their point of view, their experiences, their background, their vocation, their skills, their agency, all of that. Like, what are they trying to do? Have them focus on different things. What I notice when I walk into a room is very different from what my teenagers might notice, right? And if there's somebody who reads a lot, maybe they can use bigger words. If there's somebody who gets excited really easily, maybe they laugh a lot. They could tell jokes. They could be funny or sarcastic. Get these personality traits into your dialogue as well. Again, you don't want your dialogue to be flat. Avoid overusing cliches or overusing their speech patterns. So yes, give them each a speech pattern, but don't repeat it so often that it starts to feel tired. Check out the rule of three that I outlined in tip number three. Because anything more than that and your reader will notice it and it'll start to sound really repetitive. So use it to give your reader flavor or an idea. And if you want to show a dialect that they speak in broken English, let's say, for example, Well, And you want to use apostrophes and drop letters and things like that, do it a few times to show it and then don't annoy your reader by continuing to do it all the time because it's really hard for them to read and they'll just skip it. Lots of times writers will come to me with a couple of really, really widely spread examples such as You know, the Jamie character in Outlander, when he speaks in a dialect through the entire books, or Hagrid in Harry Potter, who also speaks in a very broken dialect through the entire books. Those are the exception and not the rule. It's actually not that common. It's not that common to find, and publishers today likely would have changed that. So spending some time tightening up your dialogue is one of the biggest bangs for your buck that you can actually invest your time in when revising your book. Try this the next time you reach for a published book on yourself. Here's a test for you. Flip to a page with lots of dialogue. It should be easy to find it because it's quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, and it should be easy to digest. Yes, there's Lots of white space is just how you're going to notice that there's a lot of dialogue on a page. There's lots of places or lots of space where there's no words. And if you do that, and you read it, and it's easy to digest, and the characters sound super awesome, and the dialogue is strong, you're going to find yourself immersed pretty quickly, and you're going to be flipping to the next page. Even if you've read that book before, you're going to read a few pages before you can pull yourself away. You're giving that book a chance. This is the same chance that you want readers to give your book. If you don't spend the time and your dialogue ends up boring and you've got pages and pages and pages of it, readers are going to get impatient. They're going to put your book down. And I know that's not going to be you though, because you're now armed after listening to this podcast with a whole list of things to make your dialogue sparkle on your next trip. I would love, love, love to hear from you in the comments, which of these tips was the most helpful to your work in progress? Thanks for tuning in to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vidori. I'll be continuing to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you're listening. Also visit SuzyVidori. com forward slash subscribe. newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you'll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training, events, and writing courses that happen in my community. If you're feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page of your writing that isn't quite where you want it to be yet for our Show Don't Tell page review episodes. Remember that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven't even thought of yet. And I can't wait to help you make it. Absolutely. If you're feeling called to write that book, keep going and I'm going to be right here cheering you on. See you again next week.