Common Mistakes New Fiction Authors Make in Dialogue

Dialogue is where a manuscript declares itself. Readers will forgive a slow opening chapter, a plot that wanders, even a protagonist who takes a while to warm up. They will not forgive two characters standing in a kitchen explaining the plot to one another. The encouraging part is that most dialogue problems are technical rather than mysterious, and technical problems can be fixed in an afternoon with a pencil. Here are the ones that show up again and again in submissions, along with what to do about them.

The tag that is doing three jobs at once

'He's never coming back,' she whispered mournfully. Eight words, and four of them are the author waving from behind the curtain. A tag exists to tell the reader who is speaking. That is the whole job. When it starts carrying emotion, volume and attitude as well, it stops being invisible and starts being noise.

Stick to said, asked, and occasionally replied or answered. Not because said is elegant, but because readers' eyes pass over it the way they pass over a full stop. Every time you reach for opined, retorted or chuckled, you pull attention away from what is actually being said.

The same goes for adverbs. Cut them by default. If a line genuinely needs a contradictory delivery – someone agreeing cheerfully while loading a shotgun – the adverb will earn its place. Most of the time it is a confession that the line itself isn't doing enough work.

Which brings us to the better tool: the action beat. Compare these.

'I won't sign it,' he said defiantly.

He put the pen down and pushed the paper across the desk. 'I won't sign it.'

The second version does everything the first one did, and gives the reader a physical detail to hold on to. One warning, though: you cannot sigh, laugh or shrug a line of speech. You do those things around it. 'Fine,' he shrugged is a category error, and editors notice.

Information wearing a conversation as a disguise

You know the shape of it. One character tells another something they both already know, purely so the reader can overhear it. 'As you know, the lease runs out in March, and your mother's will left the house to both of us.' Nobody speaks like that to a sibling. Nobody has ever spoken like that to a sibling.

Ways to fix it without losing the information:

• Find the character who genuinely doesn't know. A new partner, a solicitor, a neighbour who has heard half the story and drawn the wrong conclusion.
• Put the information under pressure. Someone is trying to hide it, or has just discovered it, or is using it as a weapon.
• Let someone be wrong about it. Correction is one of the most natural ways to deliver facts.
• Interrupt it. 'The lease –' 'Runs out in March. I can read a calendar.'

There is a cousin to this problem: characters announcing their own feelings. 'I'm angry because you lied to me.' Readers can see that. What they want is the behaviour that comes with it – the delayed answer, the deliberately dull question, the coat fetched from the hook.

Everyone sounds like the same person

Here is a quick test. Take a page of conversation and delete every name and tag. Can you still tell who is speaking? If not, you have a voice problem, not a dialogue problem.

Voice is built from specific, repeatable choices rather than accent: vocabulary, sentence length, whether a character answers a question directly or slides around it, what they notice in a room, how they address other people, whether they use contractions. One character says 'Whatever you're having.' Another says 'Double espresso, and if the machine's broken I'll wait.' Same scene, two entirely different people.

Try writing a line of dialogue for each of your main characters in response to the same provocation – a stranger pushing in front of them in a queue. If three of them say roughly the same thing, the characters need separating before the dialogue can improve.

Dialect spelled out letter by letter

New writers often reach for phonetic spelling when a character has an accent: 'Aye, laddie, dinnae fash yersel.' It looks committed on the page and it does the opposite of what it intends. It slows the reader to a crawl, it can read as mockery, and it reduces a person to a set of vowel sounds.

Do the work with rhythm and word order instead. A character's speech can feel Scottish, Jamaican, Mancunian or Nigerian through syntax, idiom and phrasing, with two or three light markers to anchor the ear – then stop. Consistency matters more than volume. If you drop a letter in chapter two, keep dropping it in chapter twenty.

The same caution applies to characters speaking English as a second language. Do not let broken grammar carry the character. Precision, formality, a translated idiom or a perfectly chosen wrong word will do far more, and it will not insult anyone in the process.

The mechanics that quietly trip readers up

Small errors here pull people out of a scene faster than any clumsy line. Most of them are easy to spot on a dedicated pass:

• New speaker, new paragraph. No exceptions. When two characters share a paragraph, the reader loses track of who is talking.
• One end mark only. Not 'Where are you going?!'
• Comma before a tag, full stop when the tag stands alone. 'I'm leaving,' she said. But: 'I'm leaving.' She picked up her bag.
• No comma before an action beat. An action beat is a sentence, not a tag.
• Dash for interruption, ellipsis for trailing off. Never both together.
• Keep a character's action in the same paragraph as their speech, so the reader knows whose hands are being described.

Read your scene aloud at this stage. Your ear will catch the place where two speakers have merged long before your eye does.

Every line should want something

Dialogue is not conversation. Conversation is people agreeing, filling silences and repeating themselves; dialogue is people trying to get something. A line can deflect, probe, flatter, bargain, stall or confess, but it should be doing at least one of those things.

This is why the middle of a scene often sags. Strip out the greetings, the agreements and the lines that restate what the previous line already established. Then look hard at your endings. New writers tend to tack on a final line that explains what the exchange meant. Cut it. Let the silence after the last line carry the weight.

And remember that not answering is a form of speech. A character who changes the subject, or asks a question instead of replying, is telling the reader something the dialogue itself never says.

A practical pass for any conversation

When a scene of dialogue isn't working, run it through these steps in order:

1. Read it aloud. Mark every place you stumble.
2. Delete the names and tags. Can you still identify the speakers?
3. Count the tags. Replace the fancy ones with said, and cut most of the adverbs.
4. Swap one tag per exchange for a physical beat.
5. Cut the first two and last two lines, then read it again. It is often better.
6. Check the paragraphing and punctuation, one speaker at a time.

None of this requires new ideas, only attention. Do it once and the scene will tighten. Do it to every conversation in the manuscript and readers will stop noticing the dialogue at all, which is exactly the point.

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