How to Write Realistic Dialogue

How to Write Realistic Dialogue Image courtesy: Lisa Fotios


Realistic dialogues are the substantial tools to reveal the genuine portrayal of characters and standardize the speaking manner in your story. If you master the trick to write true-to-life conversations, you can convey the real emotions and convincing ideas to the readers.

You can draw more audience into the story by revealing a more natural narrative about the characters and whole plot. It also helps in moving the plot forward by conflict, revelatory, decision-making, and expositional dialogues if you learn how and where to write them correctly to engage readers.

Here are some fundamental pinpoints to add realistic dialogues in your stories and make them more alluring and believable.

Understand the characters and uphold consistency

Recognizing the emotional and physical state of the character and indeed knowledge about the certain situations in your story will help you write reality-based dialogues.

What is the character’s mindset, personality, fears, triggering points, genuine behavior, and the type of relationship all voices hold with each other will let you understand the situation and characters more precisely.

Furthermore, you should uphold the consistency in the character's personality or show the events that cause changes in their behavior to showcase more realism.

Tighten the lengthy conversations and add contractions or slang

Another crucial thing to consider when writing realistic dialogues is to tighten unnecessary long speeches into concise and understandable dialogues, weaving implications to add more suspense and make conversation engaging.

In addition, it is also effective to add contractions and slang or swear words into the narration, depending on the character’s personality to make it more like real life conversations. The dialogues do not need to match all rules of grammar and can be informal and natural as in daily life conversations.

Assuring the conversations drive the plot and story forward

Dialogues are the building block to explore the characters and plot, and drive the story forward. Identify what you want to convey through the dialogues or what are the morals or goals of the story before inserting conversation among characters.

Write dialogues that create conflicts, tension, and suspense for story and plot development, keeping readers invested to unfold the upcoming chapters.

Hear people around you to create mannerism

One of the best practices to write more realistic conversations is to hear and observe the people around you if any of them matches the characters in your story.

Scrutinize how they communicate, react, or behave and what language they use, analyzing mannerism in specific scenarios. It will give you more detailed insight about the realistic dialogues in your writing.

Introducing mannerism in your context related to the characters will make the script more genuine and characters more unique and distinct.

Have insight into character’s background and educational history

The characters in your story may belong to different professions, cultures, and religions. Therefore, it is essential to pay attention to these aspects to write more relatable and realistic conversations.

For example, a doctor may use some medical terms in conversation, while a young boy on the street verbalizes slang words in his speech.

Spell out the dialogues loudly

When you are done writing the dialogues in a conversation, read them loudly to let your brain hear the words and sequence and allow you to understand them better.

Make sure they fit well with the character and articulate the main purpose of conversation. You can practice them roughly and edit them if you find them unrealistic.