How to Write Better Dialogue

Most dialogue is just people talking. The fix is rarely better lines. It is usually a better scene underneath them.

Writers who worry about dialogue usually try to fix it at the line level, hunting for sharper phrasing. That almost never works, because flat dialogue is a symptom. The cause is underneath it.

Dialogue is flat when the scene has no conflict

If two characters want the same thing and are cooperating, no amount of craft will make the exchange interesting. The line level is not where this is fixable.

Before rewriting a single line, ask what each character wants in this specific scene, and how those wants are incompatible. Even mild incompatibility transforms an exchange. Two people agreeing about lunch is dead. Two people agreeing about lunch while one is trying to leave and the other is trying to keep them there is a scene.

People rarely say what they mean

Real conversation is mostly indirect. We hint, deflect, change the subject, and answer questions that were not asked. On the page, characters who state their feelings plainly read as false even though the sentences are clear.

The exercise: take your flattest scene and forbid every character from naming what they actually want. Force them to pursue it sideways. Most writers find the scene gets better immediately, and that the original was explaining rather than dramatising.

Cut the first and last line of every speech

Mechanical, unreasonable, and effective. First lines are usually throat clearing. Last lines usually explain what the speech already conveyed. Cut both, read it back, restore only what you genuinely miss.

You will restore less than you expect.

Characters should not sound alike

The test: delete every character name from a page and hand it to someone. If they cannot tell who is speaking, you have one character wearing several names.

Difference comes from how people think, not from verbal tics. Sentence length, whether someone answers directly or circles, whether they ask questions, their level of formality, what they notice. A dialect or catchphrase is decoration on top of a character who still sounds like everyone else.

Let silence do work

A character who does not answer is doing something. Refusal, deflection, and the pause before a lie all carry more weight than a written line, and film handles them better than any other medium. Writers new to screenwriting tend to over write speech because they are thinking in prose, where silence is harder to convey.

Read it aloud, and badly

Read at normal speed without performing. Skilled reading disguises bad dialogue by supplying the intention that should be on the page. Flat reading exposes lines nobody would say, rhythms that do not scan, and speeches that go on after their point has landed.

The distinction that matters most

There is a difference between dialogue that is well written and dialogue that is doing work. Well written dialogue is enjoyable to read. Dialogue that works advances the scene, reveals character, and changes the relationship between the people speaking.

Plenty of scripts are full of clever lines that accomplish nothing. The question to ask of every exchange is not whether it is good, but what is different by the end of it. If nothing has changed, the scene has not happened yet.