Dialogue is an important part of any story since it brings your characters to life. A lot can be expressed in dialogue – your character's voice, upbringing, certain personality traits – but that's not all. It's often a great tool to develop backstory without that dreadful info dumping.

However, just as it with any other parts of your story, dialogue is also incredibly easy to screw up. If that happens, it becomes unnatural, breaks up the flow, messes with your pacing, or turns into something horrible altogether.

So what are some things we want to avoid:

1. Write like you say it.

In real life, my mouth just moves. My brain isn't always on the lookout for grammatical errors. I speak in fragments. I use slang. Contractions are my friend. Those are all things your teachers might have told you to avoid in a narrative. Ignore this advice for dialogue. You want to make your characters as real as possible, so they should also talk the part.

However, watch out if you write historic fiction or write in unusual settings. Your character's speech should match his/her surrounding. A lady in the 18th century would not have said to her husband, "Come again. This sure ain't happening, buddy." In those times, she would have been lucky to be allowed to speak out of turn at all. A "Thanks, milord. It is an honor you are considering my opinion" would be more in line with that time (I picture this in a rather nasally voice with a slight British accent 😊)

Your characters also express themselves differently when faced with unique situations. While one character might speak slang or colloquial speech in certain situations, they might speak much more formal at other times.

Take Marcel, for example, one of the leading side characters in Trapped. When faced with a street gang, Marcel talks like this:

"Yo, we ain't looking for trouble." Marcel's chin points to Finn's house. "We're just here to pick someone up and be gone in a few minutes."

"Cameron? He sometimes runs errands for me." The man's eyes dart to Finn. "You his brother?"

Finn nods but keeps his mouth shut.

"You look just like him," the man remarks. "Where're you taking him?"

Marcel shifts his weight as his fingers move closer to the hem of his pants. "You ask a lot of questions." His voice is icy and gives me the chills.

I crawl further into my seat, ready to drop to the footwell of the car if Marcel decides to pull the gun. Why of all days did I have to put on my big-girl panties tonight instead of staying home?

"Like I said, he runs errands for me," the guy tells Marcel, his tone just as cold. "He's like family."

A smile spreads on Marcel's lips. "Well, he ain't your little bitch, so don't fuck with me. He's coming with us."

Marcel, however, isn't always a badass. There are plenty of occasions he talks in a more formal context, so his speech pattern changes. Let's look at an example from Remember:

"My sister," Marcel says. "She can't fly out until a few days before the execution since she has to care for my niece, so we'd appreciate if you could give her some liberal visitation once she arrives."

"It's his mother, right?"

"Yes."

"I'm sure we can arrange that. Visitation goes up until 8:30 am the day prior to the execution. In the past, families like to stretch this to the last minute. I'm sure you'll do the same?"

"Yes. I'd also ask you to reconsider your denial of Reshay Young. He's his brother and would like to see him just once."

The warden flinches. "He has a criminal record."

"But no assaults or anything else of a violent nature." Marcel leans back in his chair. "Come on. My nephew is about to die. You make up the rules, so can't you grant this one exception."

The warden's lips twist, the struggle all too visible. Finally, he sighs. "One." His index finger lifts, probably to make sure we understand him correctly. "On the last day, restricted to fifteen minutes, and alone. That's the best I can do."

"And the execution? I know Deval requested him as one of the witnesses."

The muscle in the warden's jaw twitches erratically. "Again, it's against prison policy."

"My nephew is dying, Warden. It's his last request. Are you seriously going to deny him that because of some bullshit policy?" Marcel's stare is hypnotizing.

Another thing to look out for is that your dialogue should reflect your character's personality traits. A guy without a college degree will speak differently from someone with a law degree. Choose phrases, verbs, and expressions that are true to your character's voice and use dialogue to distinguish characters from each other. If they all sound the same, you have a problem. Most of the times, a reader should be able to pick up who is talking (at least for the main characters) from an individual speech pattern. Just like in real life, your characters should all sound differently.

2. Watch your dialogue tags

I'm one of those authors who isn't fond of "to say" and "to ask", however, over the years, I have come to accept those tags as necessity. "Says/Said" is invisible to the reader. Almost any other dialogue tag draws attention to itself.

I still don't like them and use them sparingly, however, this doesn't mean you should come up with a bunch of "creative" dialogue tags. That's even worse because it will tear the reader out of their reading flow. A tag should not overpower the dialogue in itself.

So what do I recommend? Avoid dialogue tags as much as you can and use either action tags or no tags at all.

Let's look at an example from In Re Baby Q:

"I think you are in my seat."

I turn around, startled by the battle of wills that is about to unfold. Felix is towering over my new friend, his arms akimbo. To a bystander, his stance is rather threatening. All he needs to do is snarl and pee against the chair to mark his territory, and he could pass as a kickass werewolf in human form.

Cole shrinks back, apparently not eager to start a confrontation. "Sorry, man, she told me she doesn't have a boyfriend."

Now would be a good time to tell poor Cole that this is just a prank and that Felix is nowhere near to being my boyfriend but a married man—to another woman.

"Beat it, punk."

I stare at Felix with an open mouth, the humor of the situation forgotten. What's wrong with him?

"What the hell was that?" I ask when Cole disappears back to his table, the expression on his face that of a dog with his tail between his legs.

"Section five, paragraph three of your contract. You are to refrain from intercourse with another man during the entire duration of your surrogacy, which means, starting today."

"We were only going to have dinner."

"Horney little bastard was trying to score." Felix huffs. "Who picks up a woman in a bar these days other than for having sex with her? Trust me, I'm a guy. I know."

"Oh yeah. Then why are you here?"

"Same reason. Once a month, I get a night out and I go to a bar to get drunk before taking a girl home to my Berkley apartment."

"That's a jerk thing to do. You're married."

If you look at the entire dialogue above, I used exactly one dialogue tag, and that is "to ask", somewhere buried in the middle. The rest of this rather fast paced dialogue has either action tags (meaning the reader is told what a particular character is doing before, during or after he/she mutters the words) or it doesn't have any tags since the bulk of the conversation takes place between Felix and I-narrator Ashlynn, so the reader can pick up who is talking by merely following along.

3. Don't double up when you don't have to.

When I was still doing a lot of beta reading, I noticed that some authors like to double up on action and dialogue tags. It's something I used to do a lot, but fortunately, my editor Nicole beat it out of me (in a virtual sense, lol).

Now, what do I mean by doubling up?

"We must run!" Tom said, sprinting ahead.

Here, you have both a dialogue tag (to say) and an action tag (sprinting ahead). However, you don't need both. The dialogue works just as well with just the action tag.

"We must run!" Tom sprinted ahead.

This also applies to dialogue tags that follow dialogue when you already added an action tag up front. In the example of Baby Q above, it would go like this:

Cole shrinks back, apparently not eager to start a confrontation. "Sorry, man, she told me she doesn't have a boyfriend," he says.

Here, you don't need the "he says" in the end since the reader already knows that Cole is the speaker from the action tag in front. Therefore, you can just drop the dialogue tag like it was done in the actual chapter.

Cole shrinks back, apparently not eager to start a confrontation. "Sorry, man, she told me she doesn't have a boyfriend."

4. Don't convert action tags into a dialogue tags

That's maybe one of many mistakes I made as a newbie writer. If you read Living With The Choices We Make, the dialogue is still full of them since I hadn't had a chance to edit it yet.

Example:

"You're such a jerk," he smirks.

Aghh, just no!! You can't smirk a sentence, just like you can't smile, grin, or snort one. Those are action tags and should be moved to the front of the dialogue, or at least be separated by a period.

He smirks. "You're such a jerk."

Or

"You're such a jerk." He smirks.

The second example works better if the action tag is placed in between dialogue fragments as it was in the Baby Q example above:

"Horney little bastard was trying to score." Felix huffs. "Who picks up a woman in a bar these days other than for having sex with her? Trust me, I'm a guy. I know."

In this case, "Felix huffs" is an action tag, not a dialogue tag. Therefore, it should never be separated by commas since it would otherwise turn into a dialogue tag, and again, you can't huff a sentence. That's a sound you make with your nose or mouth and not your tongue in order to speak.

5. Everything you need to know about action tags (action beats)

**Note: This wisdom doesn't come from me but was taken straight from a newsletter sent by my editor Nicole Ayers.

An action beat is a sentence that follows a line of dialogue, and it's exactly what is sounds like. The speaking character does something before or after their line of dialogue.

Action beats are useful:

1. They offer variety. If you hate the monotony of said, even though you understand its purpose now, action beats also show the reader who is speaking.

Caution: Don't overuse action beats or dialogue tags. One dialogue tag is needed for every five or six lines of dialogue (when two characters are speaking). More tags are necessary if more than two characters are speaking. You can get away with more action beats than dialogue tags, but you don't need one for every line of dialogue.

2. Action beats help readers make inferences about what's going on inside a character's mind without you having to tell them. More show, less tell.

Caution: If the character's dialogue is strong enough, you may not need an action beat. Don't water down your dialogue for the sake of including an action beat.

3. Action beats allow you to share significant stage directions and character quirks.

Caution: If you're overusing action beats, you're probably bogging your reader down with actions that don't propel the scene forward. Two biggies to avoid: heads nodding and shaking. If the character answers yes, then readers don't need to see the affirmative head nod, too.

4. Action beats can reveal a paradox. If the character says one thing but does another, readers get to solve the mystery of what's actually going on beneath the words spoken.

Caution: This is a powerful tool, so don't overuse it. It will lose its zing for readers if every other action beat reveals paradoxical subtext.

One final note of caution: a dialogue tag will fade into the background for the reader. An action does the exact opposite. It sends a signal to the reader that something is happening they need to pay attention to. And this is going to impact your pacing.

Whether you choose to use dialogue tags or action beats, be sure you're making an informed choice about what purpose they serve in your scene.