How do you write believable dialogue?

Jeffrey's answer

There are three parts to writing believable dialogue, and each matters as much as the others.

First — be an observer. Wherever I go — in restaurants, in parks, on trains — I listen. I am fascinated by people. I watch them, I wonder what their stories are, and most importantly I listen to how they speak: the cadences, the pauses, the way a sentence trails off. Real speech has rhythms no writer can invent from nothing. You collect them by listening, every day, for years.

Second — read your dialogue out loud. When I am reviewing a draft, I read every line of dialogue aloud to myself. If it sounds wrong, it is wrong. People do not speak the way some writers think they do. I have read books where the dialogue makes me put the book down and say people never speak like that — and if those writers had read it aloud, they would have heard the same thing.

Third — let dialogue do the work. This is a stylistic choice, not a craft rule, but it is mine: I use dialogue to move the story along. Another great writer might take a page to describe how the flowers looked, what a character was thinking, what was going through their head. I would rather have a character tell you that, often without realising they are telling you. Dialogue is how I keep the reader turning the page. It is also how I avoid pages of description that, however beautiful, slow the story to a halt.

Observe. Read aloud. Let dialogue do the work. That is how you make characters speak like people.

A few practical notes

• Be an observer. Restaurants, parks, trains. Listen to how people speak — cadences, pauses, the way a sentence trails off. Real speech has rhythms no writer can invent.
• Read it aloud. Every line. If you stumble, the reader will. This single test catches 80% of bad dialogue.
• Let dialogue do the work. Use it to move the story along, not just to record what people say. Dialogue can carry character, plot, and atmosphere all at once if you let it.
• No two characters should sound the same. Cover the speaker tags and a reader should still know who’s talking. Each character has their own rhythm, vocabulary, and cadence.
• Real conversation is not good dialogue. Strip the ‘um’s, ‘sort of’s, repetitions. Good dialogue is real conversation distilled — closer to how people think they speak than to how they actually speak.
• Avoid speech as exposition. If a character is telling another character something both already know, you’re using dialogue to inform the reader. The reader will spot it.
• Use ‘said’ as the default speech tag. Not ‘exclaimed’, ‘opined’, ‘retorted’. ‘Said’ is invisible to the reader; the dialogue itself should carry the emotion.
• Action between lines of dialogue creates rhythm. Pure dialogue with no beats reads as a script.