Some of us haven’t discovered that story dialogue bears only a faint resemblance to conversation. For Sci-Fi writers, this includes dialogue among aliens who think like humans.
In a normal conversation, people waste a lot of words and they don’t stay on the subject. That’s because the purpose of conversation is to entertain and to please the other party. Sometimes people give information, but this is rare since facts, by themselves, are rarely that amusing or interesting.
In conversation people also use “fillers.” Often these are some variant on “um” or “uh.” The filler could also be a real word or series of words that are repeated throughout the conversation. The filler’s purpose is to keep the other person in the conversation from taking over the conversation’s flow. In other words, while the speaker is saying “uh,” their brain is trying to think of what to say or how to phrase what they want to say so that the other person will react favorably. The filler also keeps the other person from talking and thereby grabbing the conversation’s flow before the first person is through.
Dialogue is different. The purpose of dialogue is to advance the plot and sometimes to embellish a character. Please don’t have your characters only entertain and please each other.
One problem new writers have with dialogue is that no preambles are allowed. The characters can’t say “Hello.” “How you been?” and “Nice day, isn’t it?” or any of the other the things we normally say before we get around to what we’re there to say. Story people just walk in and blurt out such things as, “I just wrecked your beautifully restored 1956 Thunderbird.” That’s not the normal way a person would approach such a calamity but it’s how a story person does it. If you feel you must, you can write the preamble stuff as something like, they exchanged their normal pleasantries and then Junie blurted, “I just wrecked…”
Another thing to avoid in dialogue is exposition. There was a time when it was acceptable for one person in a dialogue to say to another person: “As you know, Detective Ames, dead people stop bleeding quickly,” Detective Horton said.
Today, no reputable book publisher (as in doesn’t do subsidy publishing) would tolerate even one such sentence in any book edited by any editor they’ve hired. Yet, I hear there are still unpublished authors who will write long paragraphs where two policemen tell each other basic facts of police work. Or, in the same vein, two atomic physicists will tell each other, E=MC2. Don’t do this. If you absolutely must give a block of fact, just write the facts into your story narrator’s lines. A better way is to work the information in over several chapters—a fact here, a hint on that page. We do this to create the setting, and we can do it with necessary facts.
For many people dialogue that goes nowhere for more than a few lines isn’t just boring; it’s annoying. Hemingway was the rage of his time in part because he explained nothing; he made his dialogue stand alone. This was good; it eliminated the pages upon pages of eye-crossing description that filled novels before Hemingway.
But Hemingway bores some people (me, for instance) because his people aren’t going anywhere, not very fast anyway. That impression comes because so much of his dialogue consists of his hero staring at his navel and/or describing his current angst attack. (In Hemingway’s defense, I haven’t read a whole lot of Hemingway’s work. I was too impatient with what I had already read to read any more.)
This never changing approach won’t do for readers like me who want their heroes to do something, to be active, to jump on a motorcycle and save the world—or at least their loved one. Dialogue needs the backbone of plot, of a feeling of something happening. Whether you’re writing dialogue or narration, keep your story moving, changing, going somewhere.
Remember, if you bore your reader to death, in their eyes, you’re the one who dies.