Dialogue is a critical part of any novel. Apart from the fact it makes up a monumental chunk of your overall word count, it can be a powerful tool for creating suspense, driving the plot and fleshing out your characters. Get it right, and you’re halfway towards writing a killer novel. Get it wrong, and you’re done for.

If you really want to see a master of dialogue at work, you should read Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway (I go into more detail on his masterful use of dialogue in this short story here). In the meantime, here’s a few of my top tips.

Use Subtext

Beneath the words a character says aloud (‘I’m sure you will be sorely missed by everyone here’) are the unspoken words that are truly on the characters’ heart (‘I can’t bear the thought that I will never see you again’).

Subtext can be a wonderful tool for creating tension, adding depth to your story and allowing you to explore complex themes in a way that seems natural, so resist the urge to let your characters wear their hearts on their sleeves.

Make Dialogue Sound Realistic

People don’t all talk alike. Our upbringing, our culture and the kinds of people we allow ourselves to be influenced by means we all talk just a little bit differently to one another.

Giving each character a unique voice not only creates a more lifelike story, but it also helps to add depth to your various characters.

… But Not Too Realistic

If you were to write down real life speech, exactly as it is said, word-for-word, you will quickly realise that spoken language can often be downright unintelligible. Even the most eloquent of us tend to waffle on about trivialities, trip over our words or go off on strange tangents.

Unfortunately, small talk and social niceties like ‘hello,’ and ‘goodbye’ are a part of real-life speech but in a novel, they serve no purpose except to bore the reader and drag the pace down to a crawl.

Keep your characters’ dialogue clear and purposeful to avoid boring your reader to death.

Choose Your Dialogue Tags with Care

There’s been a lot of ink spilled over the years about whether you should use any dialogue tag other than ‘said’ when a character says something. Some authors insist you should never use any other tags, while others prefer the variety of ‘she whispered,’ ‘he growled,’ ‘they sneered,’ or ‘she croaked.’

There isn’t actually a hard rule about this (and even if there was, rules were made to be broken) but remember: dialogue tags slow down the pace of the story, so I would certainly choose your dialogue tags carefully to ensure they 1) make sense and 2) aren’t being wordy just for the sake of being wordy. If ‘said’ will do, there is no need to bamboozle your reader with words like ‘elucidated.’

While I’m on the subject…

Ask Yourself if You Need to Use a Dialogue Tag At All

Using dialogue tags slows down the pace. Sure, you will need them sometimes for clarity, but if you’re wanting to keep the story moving at a reasonable trot, I would recommend using them sparingly, especially in scenes where you’re trying to create a sense of urgency.

Go Easy on the Profanity

I’m not here to tell you not to use naughty language in your novels. Some novels need a bit of naughty language. However, swearing very quickly loses its shock value after the first few times and excessive words drag down the pace of your story.

As a rule of thumb, I tend to make it that if a character would swear a little bit in real life, they don’t swear at all in my story; and if they would swear a lot in real life, they swear a little bit in my story.
Oh, and for f—-goodness’ sake, remember to tailor your use of profanity to suit your target audience, unless you want to receive a lot of letters from angry parents.