How Do You Write Dialogue?
Quick answer: How do you write dialogue? Give every exchange a purpose, let characters pursue agendas, compress real speech, and trust subtext. A working method with examples.
Write dialogue by giving every exchange a purpose, giving each speaker an agenda, and compressing the rhythms of real speech without transcribing them. Good dialogue is not how people talk; it is how people talk with the boring parts removed and the intentions sharpened. Characters should speak to get something, information, forgiveness, dominance, delay, and the friction between what they want and what they say is where the life is.
Dialogue is also the fastest characterisation tool you have and the element readers' eyes fly to on any page. It earns its space twice: once by advancing the scene, once by revealing the speaker. Lines that do neither are packaging, and packaging gets cut.
The core principles
First, agenda. Before writing an exchange, know what each character wants from it, and let those wants differ. Two people who want the same thing agree, and agreement is over in a line. A daughter who wants permission and a father who wants to be needed can fill a page with electricity while discussing a train timetable. Playwrights call this the transaction of the scene, and prose writers inherit the whole toolkit: every conversation is a small negotiation, whether or not the characters admit it.
Second, compression. Real speech is padded with greetings, repetitions and filler; fictional speech keeps only the signal plus a calculated trace of noise for rhythm. Skip the hellos, enter late, leave early. Third, obliqueness. People rarely say the thing; they say something adjacent and hope. The gap between spoken words and meant words is subtext, and it is the difference between dialogue that lives and dialogue that explains.
Hearing it done well
Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants conducts an argument about an unnamed operation entirely through remarks about drinks, hills and luggage; neither speaker names the subject, and no reader ever misses it. Austen's dinner tables run the same current in a different voltage: Mr Bennet's courtesies to his wife are perfectly polite and perfectly cutting, irony as a delivery system.
Study Elmore Leonard for lean, criminal-class talk that characterises in half-lines, and George V. Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a novel told almost wholly in conversation, for how much plot dialogue alone can carry. Then read any page of your own aloud beside them. The ear catches wooden lines that the eye forgives: speeches too complete, information nobody in the room needs said, everyone speaking in the same rhythm.
A working method for your scenes
Draft the exchange fast, letting characters overlap and interrupt; polish later. Then run four passes. Purpose pass: what changed between the first line and the last? If nothing, the scene is a lobby, not a room. Agenda pass: can you name each speaker's want, and does at least one go unsatisfied? Voice pass: cover the names; can you still tell who is talking by rhythm, vocabulary and dodge-patterns? Compression pass: cut greetings, weather, repeated beats and any line that only confirms what the reader knows.
Punctuate cleanly and tag lightly, said does almost all legitimate tag work, and let action beats carry attribution where possible: she refilled his cup before answering. Beats give readers bodies in space and buy silence, and silence is dialogue too. A character who does not reply has said something, often the loudest thing on the page. Leave room for it deliberately, the way a composer leaves rests.
The mistakes that mark a beginner
Exposition through dialogue leads the list: 'As you know, brother, our father died in the mine ten years ago.' Nobody tells anybody what they both know; find another delivery route. Next is the interchangeable cast, five speakers with one voice, and the over-tagged page, where characters exclaim, retort, opine and chuckle their lines instead of saying them.
Watch also for speeches, characters exchanging paragraphs at podium length while the scene waits; for on-the-nose emotion, where everyone announces their feelings with clinical accuracy, which real humans almost never manage; and for phonetic accents that turn reading into decoding. Trust word choice and rhythm to carry origin. And remember that dialogue is action: if you can replace an exchange with 'they argued about money' and lose nothing, the exchange was summary wearing quotation marks.
What poets can take from this
- Know each speaker's agenda before they open their mouths.
- Enter every conversation late and leave it early.
- Read all dialogue aloud; the ear catches what the eye forgives.
- Prefer said, and let action beats do the attributing where you can.
- Let characters dodge questions; evasion characterises faster than answers.
- Cut any line that neither advances the scene nor reveals the speaker.
Try it yourself
Write a two-page conversation in which one character tries to borrow money and the other refuses, but neither the request nor the refusal is ever stated directly. Every line must be about something else: the garden, an old holiday, a broken phone.
Questions
How much dialogue should a story have?
There is no ratio; there is only function. Scenes of confrontation and negotiation want heavy dialogue, passages of movement and reflection want little. If your pages feel slow, more dialogue often helps; if they feel thin, more grounding narration usually does.
Should dialogue be grammatically correct?
It should be true to the speaker, which usually means fragments, interruptions and contractions. Perfectly formed sentences make characters sound like memos. Save formal grammar for characters whose formality is the point.
How do you format dialogue in a manuscript?
New speaker, new paragraph; double quotation marks in most publishing traditions; punctuation inside the closing quote; a comma before or after tags like she said. Keep formatting invisible so the voices are all the reader notices.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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