Short Story Examples With Dialogue: Two Stories Told Mostly in Speech
Quick answer: Two original short stories built almost entirely from dialogue, a returns desk and a phone call between sisters, with a breakdown of how the talk carries plot.
Dialogue carries a short story when every line changes what one character knows, wants or can do. Talk that only conveys information is exposition with quotation marks. The two original stories below are told mostly in speech: one at a department store returns desk, one on a phone call between sisters. Each turns inside a line of dialogue.
Returns
'Do you have the receipt?' 'It was a gift.' 'A gift receipt, then?' 'It was a wedding gift.' The woman behind the desk, whose badge said Anjali, looked at the box. A cast-iron casserole, orange, the expensive kind. Unopened. 'Congratulations,' she said. 'It's fine. It didn't happen.' Anjali's hands stopped on the keyboard. 'I'm sorry.' 'Don't be. It's a very good casserole. I just can't have it in the flat.' 'I can do a credit note without a receipt. Not cash.' 'A credit note's fine.' Anjali scanned the box. 'It's from the registry list. There's a name on the account.' 'His mother's.' She typed for a while. 'I can put the credit on your name instead, if you like. It's not strictly, but.' 'You'd do that?' 'I've done this job nine years. You are not the first person to bring back a casserole.' The customer laughed, which surprised both of them. 'What do people buy with it?' 'Honestly? Bedding, mostly. New sheets.' 'That's a bit on the nose.' 'It is. They buy them anyway.' The card printed. Anjali slid it across. 'Bedding's on the third floor,' she said. 'Take your time.'
The Keys
'Where are they?' 'Hello to you too.' 'Meg. Where are Mum's car keys.' 'In my bag.' 'Why are they in your bag?' 'You know why.' A pause on the line. Kate could hear her sister's kettle, and behind it the sound of her sister's kitchen, which was the sound of their mother's kitchen twenty years ago, because Meg had taken the radio. 'She's asking for them.' 'I know she's asking for them. She asked me four times yesterday.' 'She reversed into the Patels' wall.' 'I know.' 'So you took them.' 'Someone had to.' 'You didn't think to say?' 'I'm saying now. You rang.' Kate sat down on the stairs. Her mother was in the front room with the television on, waiting for the keys. 'She thinks I've got them,' Kate said. 'She thinks I've hidden them.' 'Then let her think that.' 'Meg.' 'You're the one who's there. If she's going to be angry with someone it should be someone who can leave at the end of the day. I'm here every day. I can't afford it.' The kettle clicked off. Neither of them spoke. 'Fine,' Kate said eventually. 'I've got them. I've hidden them. I'm the villain.' 'Thank you.' 'Don't.' 'I mean it. Thank you.' 'Bring the radio back sometime,' Kate said, and hung up before her sister could answer.
How the speech does the plotting
Returns opens with four lines of pure procedure and no narration, so the reader has to infer the situation. 'It didn't happen' is the turn, and it arrives in three words. The narration reports body and object, never feeling: hands stopping on a keyboard, a laugh that surprises both. Anjali's offer to move the credit is the story's kindness, delivered as a rule bent rather than a speech made. The bedding exchange finishes the plot: she is one of many, and people recover.
The Keys withholds names and context for six lines and lets the reader assemble the family from tone. The narration is limited to two moments, the sound of the kitchen and Kate sitting on the stairs, and both add information the dialogue cannot: the radio tells us about an old grievance; the stairs tell us Kate has lost. The turn is Meg's argument about who can afford to be hated, which reorganises the story from a quarrel about keys into a division of labour. Kate's last line about the radio is the grievance surfacing, small and unresolved, which is how real phone calls end.
Writing your own
Give each speaker a want that the other blocks, and let the lines be the blocking. Cut any line that both characters already know. Use narration only for what speech cannot do: a pause, an object, a body.
What writers can take from this
- Open mid-conversation; let the reader catch up.
- Each line should change what someone knows or wants.
- Keep narration to objects, pauses and bodies.
- Distinguish voices by rhythm and vocabulary, not by tags.
- End on a line that opens a new grievance rather than closing the old one.
Try it yourself
Write a story of under 400 words that is at least 80 percent dialogue, between two people who both want the same object for different reasons. The narration may describe only one room and one sound.
Questions
Can a short story be all dialogue?
Yes, and some fine ones are. The risk is that the reader loses track of who is speaking and where they are. If you go fully to dialogue, give each voice a distinct rhythm and let the speech itself reveal the setting.
How much dialogue is too much in a short story?
There is no fixed ratio. The test is whether each line moves something. A story can be 90 percent dialogue and tight, or 30 percent and slack. Cut lines that repeat what the reader already knows.
How do you punctuate dialogue in a short story?
Keep one speaker per paragraph in standard prose. The stories above run speakers together deliberately for compression, which works at this length but is unusual; in a longer piece, break the paragraph every time the speaker changes.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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