#dialoguetips

“great dialogue should sound realistic/not awkward”— is kind of incorrect

before you throw tomatoes, i’ll explain.

let’s say there’s a character who grew up around scientists; everyone in their family is a scientist, so this character grew up hearing terminology that can be considered advanced, or complicated.

throwing out random scientific words during conversations (of course in proper context) would not be out of the usual for this character.

now, i hear lots of people give tips on dialogue and say “people don’t talk like that, they talk like xyz,” however, that’s incorrect.

what makes great dialogue great, is that it suits the character. there’s a difference between dialogue coming across as tacky because the writer wrote it that way, and dialogue coming off as tacky because it’s the characters personality that made it so.

not everyone sounds the same, and dialogue never sounds only one way or another.

yes— it may come off cringey if a character randomly says a really unusual word in the middle of their sentence, but it’s far from unnatural and it still is great dialogue regardless of how it sounds. that can also come to be a character quirk if you wish.

great dialogue never meant “appeal to what the reader finds cool.” it always has, and should mean, dialogue that suits the story and even more so the characters, and shows your characters/story has continuity.

character continuity is very important. you want your characters to come off realistic in relation to who they are; traits, quirks, all of it.

so unless your plot is doing it on purpose, it wouldn’t make sense for a character who is constantly around scientists who utilize advanced words to be failing a scientific vocabulary test (for example). your character needs to be true to themselves regardless of how odd or unusual their character is.

so, to sum this up:

great dialogue ≠ phrases your reader hears every day that are natural to them

We, as writers, kinda assume our goal is to write as closely to natural speech as possible. By and large, I agree with this assumption (though there are definitely places where some authorial freedoms with reality are demanded), and thus I will now share an interesting observation on human conversation that was tucked into my forensic linguistics textbook.

Gricean Maxims

Grice, H.P. (1975) ‘Logic and conversation’ This dude Grice had some things to say about how conversations work. I guess you can read his article if you’re into it, but the thing my textbook focused on was what Grice observed and subsequently named the quantity maxim. Basically, your contributions to conversation are only as informative as required and never any more so. Everything you say is tailored for a specific addressee depending on what you assume is shared knowledge, opinions, and previously spoken dialogue. A common ground which very easily makes a normal conversation unintelligible for an eavesdropper. 

In forensic linguistics, when suspects are fabricating a lie, their audience is no longer just one specific listener, but also all the policemen, judges, lawyers, etc., and they may feel the need to fill in the gaps for that larger (legal) audience and break the quantity maxim. This happens with wholesale sentences and smaller units such as noun phrases i.e. saying the ‘small old pink cup’. In actual speech, long noun phrases like this are often broken up into two or three smaller pieces over the exchange. Over all, this explicitness is a sign of deception and falsehood. 

In writing, this breaking of the quantity maxim is fairly easy, as writing these days is very rarely omniscient third (which would know everything and wouldn’t be amiss to explain an extra thing or two) but some sort of limited (both third and first) and thus all of the prose is narration within a confined perspective. As we’re inherently sensitive to it, it’s very obvious when the writer breaks this quantity maxim and acknowledges that there is an outside audience (the reader) with uncomfortably direct, out of place information. This communication of information can be done well, but when it is done well, the reader doesn’t feel anything amiss at all with the information received. With poor writing, it takes the reader out of the experience. (Of course, as with anything, you could satirize such mistakes, as others have). Of course, the quantity maxim (the actual amount of information) is different between prose and actual in text dialogue, as well as between third person limited and first person limited, I would think. 

Conclusion