Dialogue is closely related to character work, I think, and as long as I know who my characters are, I know what they would say in a specific situation.

I hate dialogue that rambles, even while I know real conversation always does it. But I also hate dialogue that only hits the Point, as if the characters are personality-less robots devoted exclusively to furthering the plot.

Picturing it as IMed sounds like a good way to imagine realistic, characterful conversation without the digressions and delays of ordinary speech.

Often I’ll hear my characters talking to one another. I jot down the conversation as they’re having it then go back and insert description, tags, etc. That becomes seeds for a scene. Sometimes I’ll read it aloud. (That actually makes me a little crazy; I never sound like my male characters should, lol.)

Nice post! Thank you!

Joanna Aislinn
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I, too, find that reading my dialogue aloud helps. I also try to limit poor grammar to one character, eaves drop often and watch lots of movies… 😉

Part of what helped me is rather unconventional, but I found that using instant messaging was a good way to grasp the way people actually talk in writing. Part of this was talking to others and paying attention to how they spoke, but most of it was recognizing that when I instant message someone, I almost always write what I’m thinking, what I’d say, rather than complete thought out sentences. They were informal, full of slang, fragments, etc., but also without the usual “ums” and pauses and odd repetitions that are common in actual speech.

I paid attention to my words and how other people spoke and began trying to imitate that in my writing. It became much easier to see when a character was saying something that sounded very awkward or unrealistic.

The bigger challenge once I learned to write naturally was learning to distinguish between the characters so that they didn’t all sound the same. A lot of times this takes conscious thought for me. I’ll listen to a character talk in my head and try to pay attentions to the patterns. Some people are very casual while others are a bit more formal (or the same character might be both depending on who he’s talking to). Some use the word “that” often, and others might curse.

This is something I still have to pay attention to in revisions. Sometimes a character will say something that doesn’t sound quite like him, or two characters will sound very similar and I’ll work to vary the sentence structure or phrasing a bit more.

I also think doing critiques can help. When you see what is wrong with other people’s dialogue it becomes easier to notice similar errors in your own.

Oh, and read authors renowned for their dialog and see how they do it, take every syllable apart. I’ve learned a bit of something from Raymond Chandler, Richard Price, Elmore Leonard, and others. (Although sometimes this learning method can be daunting as the dialog can be unattainably good.)