lonely planet

Okay, let’s be real—dialogue can make or break a scene. You want your characters to sound natural, like actual humans talking, not robots reading a script. So, how do you write dialogue that feels real without it turning into a mess of awkward pauses and “ums”? Here’s a little cheat sheet of what real people actually do when they talk (and you can totally steal these for your next story):

1. People Interrupt Each Other All the Time In real conversations, nobody waits for the perfect moment to speak. We interrupt, cut each other off, and finish each other's sentences. Throw in some overlaps or interruptions in your dialogue to make it feel more dynamic and less like a rehearsed play.

2. They Don’t Always Say What They Mean Real people are masters of dodging. They’ll say one thing but mean something totally different (hello, passive-aggressive banter). Or they’ll just avoid the question entirely. Let your characters be vague, sarcastic, or just plain evasive sometimes—it makes their conversations feel more layered.

3. People Trail Off... We don’t always finish our sentences. Sometimes we just... stop talking because we assume the other person gets what we’re trying to say. Use that in your dialogue! Let a sentence trail off into nothing. It adds realism and shows the comfort (or awkwardness) between characters.

4. Repeating Words Is Normal In real life, people repeat words when they’re excited, nervous, or trying to make a point. It’s not a sign of bad writing—it’s how we talk. Let your characters get a little repetitive now and then. It adds a rhythm to their speech that feels more genuine.

5. Fillers Are Your Friends People say "um," "uh," "like," "you know," all the time. Not every character needs to sound polished or poetic. Sprinkle in some filler words where it makes sense, especially if the character is nervous or thinking on their feet.

6. Not Everyone Speaks in Complete Sentences Sometimes, people just throw out fragments instead of complete sentences, especially when emotions are high. Short, choppy dialogue can convey tension or excitement. Instead of saying “I really think we need to talk about this,” try “We need to talk. Now.”

7. Body Language Is Part of the Conversation Real people don’t just communicate with words; they use facial expressions, gestures, and body language. When your characters are talking, think about what they’re doing—are they fidgeting? Smiling? Crossing their arms? Those little actions can add a lot of subtext to the dialogue without needing extra words.

8. Awkward Silences Are Golden People don’t talk non-stop. Sometimes, they stop mid-conversation to think, or because things just got weird. Don’t be afraid to add a beat of awkward silence, a long pause, or a meaningful look between characters. It can say more than words.

9. People Talk Over Themselves When They're Nervous When we’re anxious, we tend to talk too fast, go back to rephrase what we just said, or add unnecessary details. If your character’s nervous, let them ramble a bit or correct themselves. It’s a great way to show their internal state through dialogue.

10. Inside Jokes and Shared History Real people have history. Sometimes they reference something that happened off-page, or they share an inside joke only they get. This makes your dialogue feel lived-in and shows that your characters have a life beyond the scene. Throw in a callback to something earlier, or a joke only two characters understand.

11. No One Explains Everything People leave stuff out. We assume the person we’re talking to knows what we’re talking about, so we skip over background details. Instead of having your character explain everything for the reader’s benefit, let some things go unsaid. It’ll feel more natural—and trust your reader to keep up!

12. Characters Have Different Voices Real people don’t all talk the same way. Your characters shouldn’t either! Pay attention to their unique quirks—does one character use slang? Does another speak more formally? Maybe someone’s always cutting people off while another is super polite. Give them different voices and patterns of speech so their dialogue feels authentic to them.

13. People Change the Subject In real life, conversations don’t always stay on track. People get sidetracked, jump to random topics, or avoid certain subjects altogether. If your characters are uncomfortable or trying to dodge a question, let them awkwardly change the subject or ramble to fill the space.

14. Reactions Aren’t Always Immediate People don’t always respond right away. They pause, they think, they hesitate. Sometimes they don’t know what to say, and that delay can speak volumes. Give your characters a moment to process before they respond—it’ll make the conversation feel more natural.

The note at the end is definitely very important as well. The thing about writing advice I'd like everyone to remember is that it's meant to be used alongside the learning process, not as hard and fast rules that will automatically turn you into one of the historical greats. Also, different things apply to different areas. Stories are, ideally, living things that breathe and move organically in ways which do NOT play well with rigid ideas like the template approach I see too many people try to use because they think there's some kind of algorithm or recipe for writing like it's a hard science when it really isn't.

These things are GUIDELINES. And unfortunately, the only way you'll get them to work properly for you is by treating them as such and applying them loosely so you can see the difference, understand why they're like that, and then adapt it properly into your lexicon so you can organically utilise them as developing skills on every new project exactly where and when and how they're needed.

If I can add on: I cannot recommend learning stagecraft enough. Go to your local drama class if there is one and hopefully they'll still remember all these things and with any luck it won't have been left to rot while they adopt the capitalist cookie-cutter spoon-feeding audiences-are-stupid-and-need-everything-spelled-out-for-them-because-we-killed-media-literacy bullcrap we see in too many shows and films nowadays. I'm still learning these skills myself though I personally didn't learn them from reading a post like this. I learned them through observing the dialogue in existing well-written shows, film, and printed scripts, alongside performing them on stage to be taught and experience how to get it all working smoothly.

Also, to expand upon points 2 and 11 from my perspective:

I like to imagine we are peeking through a window into the characters' worlds.

They won't and should never be saying anything for the audience's benefit because we don't exist.

Now obviously at the meta level the whole show is in fact for the audience, but the main point I'm getting at is that - in my very strong (very sure I'm objectively correct lol) opinion - your characters should never feel or look or otherwise come across like they're mouthpieces for the writers to tell you information. The characters shouldn't act like they're having a scene to tell you shit even when they literally are, because within the world of the story they aren't. So the dialogue should reflect that.

Ask yourself one simple question:

Would this character say this thing, to themselves or to another character or whatever, if we weren't here on the other side of the screen to hear it?

This is, in my opinion, the biggest and most painful mistake new/inexperienced/underpaid/rushed writers make.

If a character/group of characters wouldn't need to explain it for someone within the world of their story, then they wouldn't explain it. **

And in those situations, you as the writer just have to learn visual storytelling, good editing skills, other types of clue-leaving in how you write natural interactions which ignore the audience's presence, and expect/trust the audience to have enough media literacy skills to put it all together into understanding what's going on without being spoon-fed like they're too busy watching tiktok or something to pay attention to the story. (And if they are, then they can put the phone down and pay attention or put the story down and stop wasting their own time barely half-engaging with something they clearly don't care enough about to engage with properly anyway.* People don't learn if they're never expected to.)

But that's a very complex skill which takes a lot of time and experience to build. I'm aiming for it and I hope with time and practice and experience I can be half as good as the writers I admire like the ones who wrote the script for the first season of Arcane: League of Legends (which was RIFE with skills taken directly from stagecraft, intentional or not).

*(Because there's always someone nowadays weaponising disabled people to argue for pushing laziness/exploitation/whatever else in art creation: If you're someone who does care about watching/reading stories but who also does need to have multiple things happening to engage with things, that's valid. My point is that the story should never be written with a focus on explaining things to you. If you can't watch/read a story because it's too difficult to focus on, then complain that the writing was bad because it didn't explain everything to you, that is genuinely your own problem to sort out and I say this as a neurodivergent person who hasn't been able to read most books in over a decade because my attention span for reading is shot to hell. That's not the writer's problem; it's mine. I would much rather they write a good, living narrative (and make it so I need to hold a stim toy in my hand or take breaks from and come back or - in the case of film and TV - pause to process and take breaks from and come back later, or any other type of managing skill) than dumb everything down for me and treat me like I'm an idiot just because I was struggling to focus for longer periods of time.

'Accessible' doesn't mean throw all basic storytelling skills out the window. ADHD/Autistic and other types of neurodiverse people like us have been engaging in media without it being spoon-fed to them just fine for as long as storytelling has existed. It's far more ableist to argue that we should destroy every creative art and new creation in existence to talk down to the audience just in case they're neurodivergent or something than it is to just expect they're smart enough to keep up or at least figure out ways of managing their needs on their end so they can enjoy the story.

Things like proper captions and considering different mediums to bring the story to life in better ways for people with different needs are accessibility. Telling story writers to butcher the writing itself because you think the audience will be too stupid to understand otherwise because they're disabled/have accessibility needs is not and is just plain shitty of a position to have.)

** Remember how I said writing advice rules are actually guidelines and you have to play with them to learn where and when and how they actually apply? Well, there are genuine exceptions to this piece of advice as well. But you're going to have to understand why it's like this first to learn what those exceptions are and how/when/where to apply them.

(One quick example are stories which actively break the fourth wall. Kids plays/educational programs/etc for younger children do this all the time as a way to pull more engagement from the audience because the majority of younger children do need constant stimuli and usually haven't developed the ability to passively engage with something that doesn't directly talk to them/act like they're there in some way.

But there are other exceptions too in adults' media which aren't just lazy writing because they're intentional with a specific reason for doing it outside of "we need to force feed as much information to our audience as possible in as few minutes as possible because we expect every single one of them to only be looking at the screen every few minutes for a few minutes at a time and if we don't tell them everything they'll be confused; fuck, how do we- ooh ok, have the characters talk like they never would specifically so we can spoon-feed the info to the audience. Phew. Done. Ok. Next scene!! Speedrun music, let's go!!!!"

There's a difference between intentional, well thought out fourth wall breaking vs "we don't have time for basic visual storytelling or any other non-direct-expositional storytelling techniques and we're expecting every single one of our audience to have lost media literacy skills and we're not going to risk an easy several billion dollars in box-office and merch sales expecting them to just... get better at it again if they want to engage with and understand our stories properly."

But you'll need to go out and look for and analyse and understand all these different types of storytelling and explore a bit yourself to get a grasp of all the amazing directions you can go with storycraft.)

Basically, go have conversations, watch how people talk, go learn stagecraft in some hopefully-good drama classes, and above all else, KEEP WRITING. KEEP PRACTICING. KEEP MAKING MISTAKES AND LEARNING AND ALLOWING YOURSELF TO BE FLEXIBLE.

Compiled some basic information I know about drawing fat characters for beginners since I've been seeing more talk about absence of really basic traits in a lot of art lately.

really helpful technique ^ once you know how to divide by halves and thirds it makes drawing evenly spaced things in perspective waaay easier:

Full tweet

I've been on the "Fuck Stickermule" train for a few years now after they posted COVID conspiracy bullshit, and it was found out their CEO was a Trump / Anti-LGBTQ+ donor.

Take your business elsewhere. Just because they have good deals occasionally shouldn't mean they should be able to use your money to support shitty recipients.

Some businesses I'd recommend checking out:

StickerGuy -Been using Sticker Guy for like 15 years for my bands stickers over the years. They have some of the best vinyl stickers I've ever used and those things are practically indestructible. Ridiculously good prices too.

RockinMonkey - I've only ever used them for one run of holographic stickers but the quality is so good and I'd definitely go to them again if I were to get more printed.

StickerNinja - Never personally used but I've seen so many people recommend them and their quality shows on their socials. And I'm fairly certain they're BIPOC owned, super pro-LGBTQ+ and are very vocally Pro-Palestine which is a plus in my book!

My kid Kinan trying to stop me from going out because there’s bombing | Gaza [@/ MuhammadSmiry on X. 01/08/24.]

This baby is still learning to talk but he says "قصف"= "bombing" loud and clear. He lost his childhood before it even started. [@/ RudaynaIbrahim on X.]

The IOF continues to steal the childhoods of countless Palestinian children. I've seen so many videos of very blatant symptoms of PTSD -seeing emotional and psychological responses to triggers from sudden sounds and movements. You can see stress and anxiousness and fear in their eyes -even when we see videos of them smiling/being hugged and comforted by journalists, doctors, and neighbors/relatives in their communities -they have been robbed -so many of them for decades now and continuously of just being able to be children -to be free from violence and oppression.

I have also seen videos of their entire lives being changed instantaneously with a debilitating injury or amputation due to their communities/hospitals/homes being air-striked, to losing their entire families and being orphaned. I've seen videos of them lifeless in their parents arms -something no parent SHOULD EVER have to record and share to get the world to fucking pay attention.

These are 'experiences,' and circumstances NO child should EVER have to face in their life. I'd say where the hell has UNICEF been -because aren't you supposed to be protecting children's rights ALL around the world? Are Palestinian children not worthy of protection? Over 10,000 of them have been MURDERED by the IOF.

Children shouldn't have to be worried about hearing BOMBS -they should be talking about their school lives, their friends, how excited they are to go to the beach, to try new foods at a restaurant they want to go to, to travel -to do so many wonderful things but THIS is what they have to live with right now even with glimpses of light and hope...

fucking look at this shit though

The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.

Motherfucker randomly started moving.

And i just googled malfunctioning t-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.

So of course, the power goes out.

And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.

Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.

And this guy hoped for the best and got it.

So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”

The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass.  They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that.  And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that.  One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”

He called up film of a chicken walking.  Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”