Top 10 Dialogue Mistakes that Kill Your Story
By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)
Awkward or boring dialogue can make readers cringe and toss our books aside to find something better.
A few months ago, I wrote a post called 10 Writing Mistakes that Kill Your First Chapter. Because of how much everyone liked that post, I decided to do a follow up. So today I’m sharing the top 10 dialogue mistakes that kill your story (in no particular order).
#1 – Too Much Direct Address
Direct address is where we call a person by their name or title (e.g., Mother, Doc).
“Bob, would you pass the peas?”
“Of course, Mary.” He turned to look at Frank. “Frank, I heard you got a new job.”
“Yes, Bob. I’m liking it a lot.”
Almost no one talks this way, and the people who do are considered strange. You can use a name or title once in a while in your dialogue, but make sure you’re doing it strategically (for example, people will often use names during an argument).
#2 – Allowing a Character to Speak Uninterrupted for Paragraphs (or Pages!)
How much do you enjoy being around a person who talks for five or ten or fifteen minutes (or more) without letting anyone else get a word in? Probably not that much.
Since this is a short list, I’ll give you just four reasons why allowing a character to talk uninterrupted is a problem. The first is that the reader usually ends up feeling preached to. The second is that you lose all sense of setting. The third is that it stops the action dead. The forth is that it can hurt the likeability and believability of your windbag character.
Even if your character is giving a speech of some kind, you need to interrupt them with body language, actions by other characters, or internal dialogue from the point-of-view character.
#3 – Dialogue That’s Too Formal
This could be someone who uses multisyllabic words when a simple word will do, it could be a character who always uses perfect grammar or doesn’t use contractions, or it could be a character who always speaks in complete sentences and never uses a sentence fragment.
You might have a good reason for wanting to do one of these things, but most readers will find it awkward. We don’t talk this way in real life, and the rare people who do are considered stuck up.
#4 – Dialogue That Repeats What’s Also in Action or Internal Dialogue
This is also known as redundancy. It can happen on a small scale.
He shook his head. “No.”
Or it can also happen big-picture. If, for example, we’re going to have a character cracking a safe, we don’t need to have them explain the whole process to another character before it happens. That makes it boring for the reader to then have to sit through the description of our character actually cracking the safe (even if something goes wrong).
#5 – Creative Dialogue Tags
A creative dialogue tag looks like this:
“I’m going to kill you,” she hissed.
When you have a character hiss, growl, beg, demand, or (insert another descriptor here) their sentence, you’re violating the show, don’t tell principle. It’s usually a sign of weak dialogue. And if they’re used indiscriminately, they can give your writing a cartoonish feel.
They’re also impossible. Go ahead—try to hiss or growl an entire sentence. Or try to laugh or snarl an entire sentence.
#6 – Not Making It Clear Who’s Speaking
Do not make your reader guess who’s speaking or count back through your lines of dialogue to figure out who said what.
If we have more than three lines of unattributed dialogue in a row (dialogue without a tag like said or an action beat), we can risk the reader losing track of who’s speaking. If we have a scene with multiple speakers, we need to be certain it’s clear who each line of dialogue belongs to. An unattributed line of dialogue could belong to anyone present.
But the sneakiest of all is when we write about two characters in the same paragraph and then tack on a line of dialogue at the end.
Ellen waved her arm above her head, and Frank sprinted towards her. “I’ve missed you.”
Who said “I’ve missed you”? It could be Frank or it could be Ellen, and the reader has no way to tell which one it really is.
#7 – Too Much Filler Dialogue
We don’t need to hear our characters say hello, ask each other how they’ve been, and all the other small talk we make on a daily basis because it’s the polite thing to do. Those don’t forward the story, and they’re boring to read.
We also shouldn’t fill our dialogue with a lot of umms, ers, and ahs. Every word needs to count.
#8 – As-You-Know-Bob Dialogue
As-You-Know-Bob dialogue is when one character tells another character something they already know. It’s done purely for the reader’s benefit (because we’re trying to give the reader some information we think they need to know), and it’s unnatural.
If it’s common knowledge, it won’t come up in conversation, and real people won’t say something that isn’t relevant to the conversation.
#9 – Dialogue That Sounds the Same No Matter Who’s Speaking
If you’ve been told your characters seem flat, sometimes the problem isn’t that you haven’t fully developed your characters. Sometimes it’s the way you’re writing their dialogue. They might all sound like you or like each other.
#10 – Dialogue That Requires a Rosetta Stone to Decode
“S’pose we must be resigned; but oh Lord! how ken I? If I know’d anything whar you’s goin’, or how they’d sarve you! Missis says she’ll try and ’deem ye, in a year or two; but Lor! nobody never comes up that goes down thar! They kills ’em! I’ve hearn ’em tell how dey works ’em up on dem ar plantations.” (From Chapter 10 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriett Beecher Stowe)
Dialect written out phonetically like this is a bad idea for many reasons. It’s frustrating to your reader. You don’t want anyone to have to work that hard just to understand what your characters are saying. It pulls them out of the fictional dream. Beyond this, dialect used in this way sounds forced and can even border on demeaning to whatever group you’re trying to imitate.
Do you have any other common dialogue problems you’d like to add to the list? Which of these causes you the most headaches in your own writing? Or when you’re reading?
Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Check out Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide
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Image Credit: FreeImages.com/Samuel Alves Rosa
Sep 24, 2015 @ 13:18:13
Hi Marcy,
This is more or less my list, so I couldn’t think of additions, but here are some comments:
#2 generated a smile. In Atlas Shrugged, does Gant’s 70-page speech qualify? (Maybe not 70, but I remember it being long.) Dialogue can’t be like normal speech (our hellos and how’s-it-goings when we arrive at our day jobs can kill a story), but it can’t be abnormal either. I had one colleague who talked like an encyclopedia, but that’s abnormal.
To #5, I’d add “…with or without -ly adverbs…” and add a bit more: I ‘m a speed reader, so I’m annoyed by tags that slow me down. I can grab nuances from what a person says or their body language–anything beyond a simple “said” or “asked” is lost on me. While avid readers aren’t necessarily speed readers, they might be annoyed too. I strive to keep them from being annoyed.
#1 is the worst sin. I’ll disagree with #6 a little: there are non-traditional ways to identify the speaker. For example, if a man and woman are conversing, you could start with “She straightened her skirt and glared at him” before she speaks. (BTW, the dialogue doesn’t have to begin the paragraph. And maybe breaking up long dialogue with body language narrative makes that detective’s long theory about the crime easier to swallow?) It becomes more confusing when more than one person of the same sex are speaking. As always, if the author is confused, or her/his beta-reader is confused, some readers will be too. More than anything, confusion will kill the story.
r/Steve
Sep 24, 2015 @ 18:20:18
Hmm. I have some things to work on. But isn’t that always the case? Excellent illustrations Marcy. This post is going into my file. Thank you! 🙂
Sep 26, 2015 @ 00:11:44
Thanks for the reminders, Marcy. 🙂
Sep 26, 2015 @ 14:18:39
I’ve gone back to working on my fiction. I can see I need to go back through your archives to brush up my skills. Thanks for this reminder. I think my worst sin is the creative dialogue tag. Now I’m going to be super aware of it.
Sep 27, 2015 @ 13:51:51
Serena,
#1 and #5 are easy to fix, the others, not so much. But don’t forget the Goldilocks Principle: too much of anything in your prose is wrong–balance is essential. Take it out of the book world: if someone says X movie is a wonderful character study, do you cringe? I do. All the writing elements have to be balanced within the context of your storytelling. (I’m referring to genre fiction mostly, of course. Non-fiction plays by other rules sometimes.)
r/Steve
Oct 25, 2015 @ 20:51:40
#9 dialog that sounds the same no matter who’s speaking: This is tough for me to get right. My beta readers seem to hate any deviation from simple American English. A college professor might use big words, a diplomat might speak more formally, and teenagers might use slang. How best to reflect this in dialog?
Oct 30, 2015 @ 14:15:36
It sounds like you’re on the right track with how to reflect the differences in dialogue. The trick is to use it with a light hand. If you overdo the differences, readers can balk at that too. Without knowing exactly what the objections of your beta readers were, I can’t give more specific advice unfortunately 🙁
Jun 21, 2016 @ 12:25:17
I might be the only one, but I disagree with number five. To me, adding those descriptors give the reader a send of how the character looks and feels. It creates a picture in their mind.
But I’m new to writing and I’m still trying to learn as much as I can. So if you could clarify a bit more it would be really helpful.
Jan 15, 2017 @ 14:48:18
Marcy, this is a great list… I really like #5 because it makes me smile. Thanks for these helpful hints. Glad I bumped into your blog today. Mary Ellen
Jan 29, 2017 @ 07:07:10
For 3# rather then say “you shouldn’t do this!” you should talk about the context in which a character would actually speak formally as opposed to encourage people not to write characters who have a large vocabulary, a flare for the dramatic, a romatic soul or a privileged upbringing. How we speak, or more how an individual character would speak is directly influenced by education, upbringing and environment.
Context is key.
Jun 11, 2017 @ 23:56:04
I think one of the errors people make in thinking about their dialogue is they forget to balance the relationship between the characters AND the reader. Bad writing happens when dialogue is just a transcript of what would happen between the characters or is essentially talking to the reader without any internal story consistency.
One example is that writers want to avoid the ‘as you know Bob’ by trying to setup a situation where ‘Bob’ does want to hear the exposition, but actually its the reader we have to impress not Bob.
Good dialogue not only makes sense for the characters speaking but also for the reader enjoying the book!
Great post look forward to reading the earlier one
Jun 12, 2017 @ 01:46:10
I semi disagree with ten when used *sparingly*. For instance, I have a character that I write frequently that has an accent that sounds like a cross between a Southern drawl and a Boston accent. He drops t’s and g’s, and will often slur his thes into the word after it. His accent is very distinct and he just doesn’t sound right without it phonetisized. But his isn’t too complicated to *read* even so. But I do agree it should be used sparingly and not with accents that are so garbled it leaves readers scratching their heads.
Jun 12, 2017 @ 04:59:39
This is a great list, although I’ve read much of it before, it never hurts to have a reminder.
The bit about overly-formal speech I think might have a small addendum: it can vary based on the setting. I did this intentionally in a story set in the middle of the 19th century, and many readers liked it, for the “period feeling.” They felt that speech was often more formal in the past, and that I captured a bit of the feel of it.
I also think that _very_ small bits of dialect can help in setting the mood or tone of a piece. It’s better to use none than too much, but a small bit that is clear to most readers can help. Unclear writing is bad in dialog or otherwise, even in classics like Ulysses, or the Book of the New Sun (which had way too many neologisms).
Sep 18, 2017 @ 19:55:27
What is the point of reading the English language if it’s not there. #5 just makes no sense to me since said is DEAD. It starts to sound like a he said, she said, they said, bob said mess. I simply disagree.