Listen Before You Invent

The fastest way to make dialogue sound fake is to write it straight from your imagination. Real speech is messy, elliptical and full of unfinished business, and when writers tidy it up too much, every character ends up sounding like the same polite stranger.

So gather material before you need it. Keep a small notebook or a note on your phone and jot down overheard lines as you go — the woman in the supermarket queue muttering "well, he can want", the teenager on the bus saying "it's not even that, it's the way she said it". You do not need whole conversations. Ten seconds of real speech can feed a page. Listen for rhythm as much as content: who interrupts, who trails off, who repeats a word when they are nervous.

One caution: do not transcribe verbatim. Real speech is full of um, false starts and repetition, and written down it reads as tedium. What you want is the illusion of realism, ruthlessly edited. Keep the oddness, cut the filler, and let one authentic phrase do the work of five ordinary ones.

Cut the Greetings and the Throat-Clearing

Most first drafts open scenes far too early. Characters say hello, ask how work was, offer tea, and only then get to the point. Cut all of it. Start late, leave early — begin mid-argument, mid-question, mid-lie, and let the reader catch up.

Compare these:

• "Hi, Tom. How was work?" "Fine, thanks. Yours?" "Busy. Listen, can I ask you something?"
• "You didn't tell her, did you?"

The second is not rude, it is simply a scene that has already begun. As a rule, you can safely delete greetings, small talk, phone pleasantries, "as you know" explanations of things both characters already understand, and most goodbyes. If a line exists only to be polite, it is costing you tension on every page.

Let People Dodge the Question

Subtext is where dialogue earns its keep. Real people rarely answer directly when something matters. They change the subject, answer a different question, offer a detail instead of a feeling, or deflect with a joke.

"Where were you last night?" can be met with "Your tea's going cold." The reader does the work, and doing that work is what makes a scene feel alive rather than reported. Before you write a conversation, give each character one thing they want and one thing they are hiding. Dialogue is then the collision of those wants.

Watch out for characters explaining themselves neatly. People rarely say "I felt abandoned when you left". They say "I redecorated the spare room. It's a study now."

Retire the Usual Suspects

Some lines have been used so often they arrive pre-worn. Ban them from your drafts and see what you invent instead.

• "We need to talk." — a placeholder for tension rather than tension itself. Have one character simply start talking about the wrong thing.
• "As you know, Bob…" — any line where a character tells another something they already know purely for the reader's benefit. Find a way to show it through conflict instead.
• "He said angrily." — adverb tags and "he cursed under his breath" tell us what the dialogue failed to. Cut the tag and let the words, or a small action, carry the tone.
• The perfect comeback. — every line a quip, everyone fast and witty. Real people miss the joke, talk over each other, and think of the right answer in the car home. Let them be slow sometimes.
• Narration clichés around speech — the released breath, the single tear, the heart pounding. Replace them with something specific to this character in this room.

Say It Aloud, Then Say Less

Read every conversation aloud. Your ear will catch what your eye forgives — the line that sounds like writing rather than speaking, the two speeches in a row that do the same job, the moment the scene sags.

Then try these edits: cut the first line and see if the scene improves; cut every third line and check whether the meaning survives; give the final line of a speech to the other character and watch the power shift. Whisper the whole thing if you have neighbours. Awkwardness is information.

Give each character one or two verbal habits — a sentence length, a favourite word, a tendency to answer questions with questions — but no more. Three tics is a caricature.

Keep a Dialogue Journal

This is where journaling pays off for fiction writers. Set aside one page a day for two short exercises. First, three overheard lines, exactly as you heard them, with a note of where and who. Second, half a page of pure dialogue between two people who want opposite things — no description, no tags, no explanation, just voices.

After a month, read it back. You will spot your own recurring habits: perhaps all your characters begin with "Look," or answer questions with "I mean". Naming the tic is usually enough to loosen it.

Dialogue is not a transcript. It is a performance of speech, trimmed and sharpened until it sounds more like people than people do. Listen closely, cut generously, and trust your reader to hear what nobody quite says.