Writing Dialogue That Sounds Like People

Dialogue sounds like people when characters talk around what they mean rather than straight at it, when each of them wants something different from the conversation, and when the writer has cut everything that is not doing a job. Real recorded speech is almost unusable on screen: it repeats, stalls, and mostly conveys nothing. What audiences experience as naturalism is a heavily compressed imitation of it.

The good news is that most of the craft here is subtraction, and subtraction is learnable.

People do not say what they mean

This is the whole thing, and everything below is a consequence of it.

In life, we ask for things obliquely, we deflect, we answer a different question than the one asked, and we say "it's fine" when it is not. Subtext is the meaning running underneath the literal words, and dialogue without it feels like a transcript of a business meeting.

ON THE NOSE
MARK
I'm angry that you forgot my birthday, and
I feel like you don't value me.

SUBTEXT
MARK
There's cake in the fridge. Someone at work
got it for me.

The second version contains no statement of feeling and communicates far more. It also gives an actor something to play, which the first does not.

The practical technique: write the on-the-nose version first if you need to, so you know what the scene is about. Then delete it and write what the character would actually say instead of that.

Give every character something to want

Flat dialogue is usually a scene where only one person has an agenda, and everyone else is present to receive information.

Before writing a scene, write one line for each character: what do they want out of this specific conversation? Not what they want in the film. What they want in the next ninety seconds. If two characters want the same thing and agree about how to get it, there is very little for them to say.

The wants do not have to be dramatic. One wants to leave. One wants to be forgiven without apologizing. One wants the other to bring it up first. Small competing wants are enough to make a scene move.

Cut the first line and the last line

Almost every scene arrives too early and leaves too late.

Greetings, small talk, and the throat-clearing at the top of a conversation are exactly what people do in life and exactly what an audience does not need. Enter the scene as late as you possibly can, ideally mid-argument, and leave the moment the point has landed.

Try this mechanically on a finished draft: delete the first line of dialogue in every scene, and the last. Read it back. In perhaps seven scenes out of ten, nothing was lost and the scene got faster. Restore the three that needed them.

The same applies within exchanges. "Hello." "Hi." "How are you?" "Good, you?" is four lines that could be one raised eyebrow in an action line.

Exposition is a problem of motive, not of volume

Audiences will absorb a great deal of information without complaint. What they cannot tolerate is characters telling each other things they both already know, purely for the audience's benefit.

The fix is rarely to cut the information. It is to find a reason for it to be said.

• Give it to someone who genuinely does not know. The new hire, the outsider, the child.
• Put it in an argument. People weaponize facts. "You were the one who signed the lease" delivers the same information as an explanation and is not boring.
• Make it cost something to say. Information that a character is reluctant to give is information the audience leans in for.
• Let it be partial or wrong. A character who explains something incorrectly is more interesting than one who explains it accurately, and you can correct it later.
• Or just cut it. A surprising amount of setup exists to explain things audiences would have accepted without explanation.

Nobody minds being told things. They mind being told things by characters who have no reason to be speaking.

Read it out loud

Not silently. Out loud, at performance speed, preferably standing up.

You will immediately hear the sentence that no human mouth would produce, the line that runs out of breath, the three consecutive sentences beginning with "I", and the joke that only works on the page. Nothing else catches these. A table read with actual actors catches even more, which is why one is worth organizing before you lock a draft.

Pay attention specifically to contractions. People say "don't", "can't", "I'll". Written dialogue drifts toward the uncontracted form and it makes characters sound stiff or foreign to themselves. Uncontracted speech is a real characterization tool, which is precisely why it should be deliberate.

Length and rhythm

Look at a page of your dialogue from across the room, without reading it. Are all the blocks the same size?

Real conversation is jagged. One person delivers six lines, the other says three words, then nobody says anything. Uniform blocks read as uniform energy, which reads as flat.

Long speeches are allowed. A monologue that has been earned, where a character finally says the thing, can be the best moment in a film. What does not work is every character delivering measured four-line paragraphs to each other in turn.

Silence is dialogue too. A character who does not answer has said something, and the action line that covers the pause is often the strongest beat in the scene.

Accents and dialect

Do not spell them out phonetically. "Ah dinnae ken whit yer oan aboot" is hard to read, condescending toward the speaker, and unnecessary, because the actor will bring the accent.

Convey regional and class voice through word choice, rhythm, and syntax instead. Which words a person reaches for, how they order a sentence, whether they use idiom or plain statement. That survives on the page, and it survives being performed by an actor whose accent is slightly different from the one in your head.

If a character speaks another language, note it in a parenthetical or an action line and write the line in English:

MARIA
(in Portuguese; subtitled)
You didn't tell them.

A short revision pass for dialogue

Run these in order on a finished scene:

1. Delete the first and last line. Restore only if something broke.
2. Search for question marks. Too many means characters are interviewing each other rather than talking.
3. Find every line that states a feeling. Replace with a behavior.
4. Find the longest speech. Ask whether anyone would let someone talk that long uninterrupted.
5. Cover the names and read it. Fix whoever has no voice.
6. Read it out loud. Fix whatever you stumble on. If you stumbled, an actor will.

Next

You have action and dialogue. Next: the small formatting marks that sit around dialogue, and the difference between a character being off screen and a character being in voiceover.