It's a common pitfall: a short story, a novel, or even a play has a fantastic, engaging plot, with interesting characters, but the audience cannot connect to them because they just don't sound...well, real. Writing dialogue that is free of artifice is one of the most challenging tasks in any piece of writing. So when you dive into your next literary masterpiece, consider the following elements of dialogue.
Make it Conversational
Imagine that you are out at a local coffee shop with a group of your closest friends, people you know well. How many times throughout the conversation that will inevitably ensue will you actually finish a sentence? The truth is that in everyday conversation, we tend not to - we get interrupted, our thoughts overlap, we trail off of our point...
Dialogue in a story or play should be no different. Don't be afraid to interrupt your characters while they are speaking if someone else has something to say. In the same vein, people often discuss more than one subject at once - we bring up a new point while debating the old, and the two continue simultaneously. Play with these ideas and see what develops between your characters.
Pay Attention to Dialect
Regardless of where you are from, you have a specific way of saying everything that you say. The word, "didn't" to some is, "din", "dint", or "didnae" to others. When you are developing your characters, make sure that you consider where they are coming from - their country of birth, their age, their background. Does your character use a lot of slang? Does (s)he have a very strong accent? Does (s)he tend to slur his or her words together in speech?
Once you know exactly where your characters are coming from, pay close attention to how they would speak. This may mean renting a couple of your favourite British movies in order to study the London dialect, or even visiting your grandparents to listen to them speak. Whatever you do, the efforts will pay off with much more believable, authentic-sounding characters.
Skip the Formalities
Unless you are writing a highly stylized or period piece, you can most likely omit the formalities from your dialogue. There are certain exchanges which almost never sound natural. One character saying, "goodbye," for example, only to have the other almost robotically return the "goodbye." People don't usually speak like this in real life. Are your characters familiar with one another? If so, they probably don't make a habit of saying "hello" when they walk into the same room. They may not use words like, "please" and "thank you" very often either.
Real people also tend to speak in contractions, rather than saying every word of a sentence. The line, "I do not want to go to the mall, and that is that," then, becomes, "I don't want to go to that mall and that's that" in real conversation. To take this one step further, you may also say, "I don't wanna go to the mall and that's that."
The bottom line is that when a reader or audience member feels that they can identify with a character, they are willing to follow that character on their journey. Overly formal or artificial-sounding dialogue, unfortunately, often creates the opposite effect, alienating the audience and leaving them unable to sympathize. So don't let it happen to you: take careful consideration of how your characters speak.
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