Let’s be honest: writing dialogue sounds like it should be easy.
After all, most of us talk all the time.
The challenge, however, lies in making it feel natural on the page. That’s a different beast entirely.
Good dialogue isn’t real speech — not exactly. It’s a polished imitation. Real conversations are full of false starts, unfinished thoughts, pauses and ‘umms’ that’d drive your reader up the wall-not that this stopped Harold Pinter from portraying dialogue as realistically as possible in his work.
But he was a one off. So don’t attempt to imitate him.
Writing effective dialogue means filtering all that out while still sounding like something a human being might plausibly say.
It’s a balancing act.
Then there’s the matter of voice. Each character needs their own distinct way of speaking — vocabulary, rhythm, tone.
It’s no good if every character sounds like the author. That’s not dialogue; that’s a monologue with costume changes.
But let’s talk rules — the kind that publishers and editors care about.
Because no matter how sparkling your dialogue might be, if it’s incorrectly formatted, it’s a red flag. And trust me, publishers don’t go looking for red flags — they go looking for reasons to move on to the next manuscript.
The big one and the question I am always being asked related to punctuation and quotation marks.
In the UK, we use single quotation marks — ‘like this’ — to indicate speech.
In the US, it’s double — “like this”.
Simple enough, though people often mix them up. If you're submitting to a UK publisher, stick with single marks unless you're quoting within speech (then it flips: ‘He said, “no problem,” and walked off.’).
New speaker?
New paragraph.
That’s a golden rule. If Jack and Jill are arguing over a bucket of water and they both speak in the same paragraph, your reader won’t know who’s saying what — and they’ll stop caring.
Clarity trumps cleverness every time.
And please — no overdoing the speech tags.
‘He exclaimed angrily’; ‘she retorted wittily’; ‘they barked, snapped, spat, huffed.’
It gets exhausting.
Often, a plain old ‘…he said’ does the job perfectly well.
Or even better: show us how they feel through action or tone, not an overcooked adverb.
Dialogue should pull its weight. It must reveal something — character, mood, conflict, backstory.
If it doesn’t, cut it.
Every line of speech should earn its place.
And a final word for the playwrights-in-hiding: novel dialogue isn’t a script.
You can’t just have back-and-forth lines with no context. Your reader needs anchoring — where are they, what’s happening around them, what’s the body language doing?
A little description goes a long way.
Writing dialogue is an art — but it’s also a craft. And like all crafts, it gets better with practice.
Read it aloud.
Record yourself.
Read great books and notice how the pros do it. Then go back and rework your lines until they sing — or at least don’t clang.
After all, good dialogue doesn’t just talk.
It tells the story.
