Tips to Making Dialogue More Natural

[Seaby]

For novels, comics, screenplays. Aside from reading the lines aloud, what are some tips to make dialogue sound natural yet productive (towards the plot)?

[joannekwan]

Listen to others! Seek out a variety of youtubers!
People will have different ways of speaking depending on their personality and backgrounds.

It's so flat and unnatural when everyone in a story sounds and speaks the exact same, using the same lexicon and pattern of speech.

[33rdCenturyCaveman]

At the same time, recognize that dialogue not meant to be perfect recreation of actual speech. In real life, people stutter, repeat themselves, interrupt each other. Actual convos very messy. Aim not for realism, but verisimilitude. Never forget that dialogue am meant to either advance the plot or reveal character, and preferably both at once.

[IndigoShirtProd]

This pretty much covers everthing:

The title is a reference to this thread, during which I did so much complaining that I figure it's about time I put my money where my mouth is. Starting with this topic! I'd like to note that a lot of these topics are going to be about interactions and thus, people...and I don't profess to know a whole lot about people. ^^; So if you detect any gross societal misunderstandings in here, or you just otherwise have your own helpful advice, please feel free to share. Okay. So, a basic conversati…

[joannekwan]

Yeah I was reading a webnovel and the characters went into a conversation about the MC's clothes and I skimmed over it asking the whole time "is this necessary? It's not even revealing anything about their character/personality."

I stopped reading that story after I realized there was more dialogue like this to come.

[33rdCenturyCaveman]

Poeple forget that a conversation is like any other action scene. Something has to be different by the end of it. Mebbe a character learns something or reaches a decision. Mebbe a relationship changes. Some people have meandering conversation styles, true, and it hard to stay on track when talking to cloudcuckoolander. But talking is a form of action so it by definition a scene where stuff am happening.

[Shanny8]

Observe the interactions that you usually have with your family and friends- how they might bring something up or start a conversation and how you respond...or vice versa. I always keep this in mind when writing, to make my dialogue to feel more natural between my characters who have had a history between them, as opposed to two characters who are just meeting or dont really know each other too well; their conversation is going to be a little more formal.

[IdiotWithPencil]

Try your hardest for the characters to not sound like they are the same character just with different bodies =P
Like I had a problem where all my characters where just sarcastic happy idiots and man was it horrible.

[PorcheJ]

Listen to how people talk to each other, especially in real-life. Also, check out good movies and how people interact there. Cinema is one of the best ways to help you on writing good dialogue. Here's a good video on how to do just that: