Common Mistakes in Dialogue Writing (and How to Fix Them)

Readers skim weather. They skim furniture, traffic, and the colour of the curtains in the drawing room. They almost never skim a line of speech. That is the privilege of dialogue — and the reason a flat scene stings so much more than a flat description.

Most dialogue problems aren't mysterious. They come from a short list of habits: characters who speak in tidy paragraphs, tags that shout for attention, conversations floating in empty space, and speeches that explain what the reader could have felt. Here's how to spot each one, and what to do instead.

Speech That Doesn't Sound Like Speech

Real conversation is a mess. We interrupt, backtrack, answer a different question from the one we were asked, and say "anyway" for no reason at all. A word-for-word transcript of a real chat is unreadable, so don't copy that either. What you want is the texture: fragments, false starts, and the way people rarely finish a sentence when they're angry.

A telltale line looks like this:

"I am extremely angry with you for missing my birthday dinner, James."

Nobody says that. Try it in pieces:

"You missed it."

"I know."

"The whole thing. Every course."

Notice what changed. Smaller words, shorter sentences, and the name held back until it would land hardest. If you want one test for natural speech, it's this: read the exchange aloud, in character. Run out of breath mid-line and it's too long. Can't imagine saying it to a friend and it needs cutting.

Dialogue That Explains Itself

The second most common fault is on-the-nose speech: a character announcing their own feelings and motives. "I feel jealous because you spent the afternoon with Sarah." Real people deflect. They talk about the washing-up while the real argument grinds underneath.

So give your characters a surface topic. Let them discuss the bill on the table, the dog, whose turn it is to ring his mother. The reader will hear the true subject loud and clear, and it will land harder for being unspoken.

Watch out, too, for characters reciting facts to each other purely for the reader's benefit. If both people in the room already know something, they won't say it aloud. Find another route — a stranger who needs catching up, a letter opened at the wrong moment, a mistake that reveals what nobody intended to say.

Missing Beats and Talking Heads

Two names on a blank page. No room, no bodies, no sense of timing. This is the talking-head problem, and beats are the cure: small actions dropped between lines of speech that plant the characters somewhere real.

A beat is not decoration, though. "She picked up her cup" is furniture. "She turned the cup so the chip in the rim faced him" is a decision, and it tells us something about her. Choose gestures that carry attitude, status or unease.

The opposite fault is just as common: a shrug, a nod and a raised eyebrow after every line. That reads like puppetry. One or two gestures per exchange is plenty, and the strongest ones should land where the power shifts — the moment someone gives ground, or refuses to.

Overused Tags and Impossible Actions

"Said" and "asked" are invisible. Readers' eyes slide straight over them, which is exactly what you want a tag to do. Fancier verbs wave for attention: he chortled, she interjected, he opined. Worse, some of them are physically impossible. You cannot smile, laugh, sigh or shrug a line of dialogue. You can say it while smiling; you cannot smile it.

• Default to said and asked. They do the job silently, and nobody notices them doing it.
• Delete the adverb. "He said angrily" tells us what the words and the beat should already be showing.
• Cut the tag when the speaker is obvious. Two people in a clear rhythm don't need labels on every line — just enough to keep the reader oriented.
• Never stack a tag, a beat and an adverb in one sentence. "He snapped irritably, slamming the mug down" is three signals for one emotion. Keep the strongest and bin the rest.
• Use names sparingly. People say each other's names when they want something or when they're about to snap. A character who uses a name in every line sounds like a call-centre script.

Accents, Dialect and the Illusion of a Voice

Writing an accent phonetically is the quickest way to exhaust a reader. A page of dropped letters and apostrophes makes the eye work harder than the ear, and it tips easily into caricature. Suggest the accent with rhythm instead: word order, what a character leaves out, and which word they'd reach for over the obvious one.

A builder from Leeds and a barrister from London can both say "I'm not going", and the two lines can feel worlds apart. "I'm not going, me." "I shan't be there." Not an apostrophe in sight.

A five-minute voice check

Cover the character names in a scene and read it back. Can you still tell who's speaking? If not, the voices are interchangeable, and the fix is usually vocabulary and attitude rather than accent. Give one character a habit of answering questions with questions; give another the habit of stating the obvious. Small, consistent differences do more work than any amount of phonetic spelling.

Five Editing Passes for Any Dialogue Scene

1. Read it aloud. Mark every place you stumble, run out of air, or hear yourself acting. That's your list.
2. Cut the opening lines. Most scenes begin with greetings and warm-up. Delete them and see whether the scene starts faster. It usually does.
3. Strip the tags. Keep said and asked, remove the rest, then work out how many you can lose altogether.
4. Check the beats. Every action should reveal mood, status or history. Anything that only fills a silence goes.
5. Hunt for subtext. Any line where a character names their own emotion is a candidate for revision. Give the feeling to a detail instead.

Keep It in Your Ears

Dialogue improves fastest when you stop chasing realism and start chasing truth — what these two particular people, in this particular room, would actually say to get what they want. Keep a notebook of overheard lines and the odd turns of phrase that catch you. Read your drafts aloud, one page at a time, and trust your ear over your cleverness. A scene that sounds right in your mouth will almost always read right on the page.

Photo: Felicity Tai / Pexels