Writing Dialogue in Fiction: 5 Common Pitfalls for Beginners
Dialogue is where a story either clicks into place or falls apart. Readers will forgive a wobbly subplot or a description that goes on a beat too long, but they will close the book the moment a character opens their mouth and says something no human has ever said out loud. The encouraging part is that most beginner dialogue problems are the same handful of habits, and each one has a fix you can test on a page today.
1. Speech that sounds written rather than spoken
New writers tend to tidy conversation into complete sentences with the manners left in. Real speech is messier. People overlap, trail off, answer a different question to the one they were asked, and restart sentences halfway through. Copy that exactly, though, and you get a transcript, not a scene. The craft is in choosing which parts of the mess to keep.
“Hello, Sarah. How are you today? I wanted to talk to you about the party.”
“I’m very well, thank you. What about the party?”
Nothing happens there, and both characters sound like forms to be filled in. Cut the preamble and let them land on each other:
“I’m not coming to the party.”
“You already told me that.”
Start late, leave early. Come in after the greetings and get out before the goodbyes. Contractions, interruptions and the odd sentence fragment will do more for authenticity than any amount of clever wording.
2. Over-tagging, and the adverb crutch
The words said and asked are close to invisible on the page, which is exactly what you want. Beginners often reach for alternatives in the belief that repetition is the enemy: he exclaimed, she retorted, he opined, she chuckled. These draw attention to the machinery. Worse is the tag plus adverb, where the writer tells us how a line was delivered instead of letting the line do the work.
“Get out,” she said angrily.
“Get out.” She didn’t look up from the paperwork.
The second version is shorter, and the reader now knows two things: she is furious, and she is holding something back. A few habits worth building:
- Use said and asked for the vast majority of tags.
- Swap a tag for an action beat when you want to show mood or keep a scene moving.
- Drop tags altogether once two speakers are established and their voices are distinct.
- Save verbs like whispered or shouted for moments when volume genuinely changes the meaning.
3. Info-dumping in disguise
The classic version is a character telling another character something they both already know, purely for the reader’s benefit. It sounds like this: “As you know, our father sold the farm in 2003 to fund the business, which is why your name isn’t on the deeds.” Nobody talks like that, and readers can smell the exposition.
Background is best delivered under pressure. Put the two characters in conflict over the facts and let the details spill out sideways:
“You sold the farm.”
“I sold a field. There’s a difference.”
“There’s a difference to you.”
The reader learns about the land, the history and the sore point between them, and nobody has to explain anything to somebody who was there.
4. Characters who all sound the same
Try this test on a page of your own dialogue: cover the names and the tags, then read it back. Can you tell who is speaking? If every character produces the same neat, grammatically correct sentences, the answer is no, and the scene will feel flat however strong the plot is.
Voice comes from more than accent. It comes from rhythm, vocabulary, and what a character refuses to say. One person answers questions with questions. Another speaks in short bursts and never finishes a thought. A third over-explains because they are nervous. Give each of your main characters one or two such habits and keep them consistent.
Be careful with dialect. Piling on apostrophes to render an accent phonetically is exhausting to read and often tips into caricature. Word order, idiom and vocabulary do the job far better: “That’ll be the rain coming,” tells us more about where someone is from than a page of dropped letters.
5. Exchanges that do no work
A scene of dialogue should turn. Something shifts: a decision is made, an alliance forms, a secret slips, a threat lands. If two characters spend a page being pleasant and agreeing with each other, cut it or find the friction underneath it.
Small talk is the usual culprit. So is dialogue that repeats what the narration has just said:
“Don’t touch that,” he warned.
The tag tells us nothing the line didn’t. The same problem shows up when a line of dialogue is followed by a sentence explaining what it meant. Trust the exchange. If a reader can’t follow without the explanation, the line itself needs another draft, not a footnote.
A quick revision pass
Once a draft is down, read the dialogue aloud, ideally standing up. Your ear catches false notes that your eye forgives. Then work through a short checklist:
- Cut the first two lines and the last two of every exchange. Does it still work? If so, leave them cut.
- Count your dialogue tags. Replace anything showy with said or an action beat.
- Delete every adverb attached to a tag, then read the line again. If the emotion has vanished, rewrite the line.
- Cover the names. Can you tell your characters apart?
- Ask what changes in each scene. If the answer is nothing, cut the scene or add a conflict.
- Read the punctuation aloud. Full stops, commas and question marks should land where a speaker would actually pause or stop.
Layout matters too, and it is easy to fix: a new paragraph each time the speaker changes, punctuation inside the quotation marks, and a comma before a tag (“Sit down,” she said) but a full stop when the tag becomes its own sentence after an action beat (“Sit down.” She pulled out the chair). Pick single or double quotation marks and stay with that choice throughout.
None of these rules are absolute, and there is a place for the occasional adverb or the deliberately unpunctuated rush of speech. The point is to know why you are doing it. Fix the five habits above and your dialogue will start sounding less like writing and more like people.
Photo: Suzy Hazelwood / Pexels
