We’re in month four of 2026, and so the fourth in the series helping you to get your novel finished this year – which means you are, hopefully, a good chunk of the way into your story. If you’re not, it’s not too late to get started!
If you’ve missed the last few posts, on finding your story, getting started and building momentum, and keeping stakes and tension high, you can catch up here:
Wherever you are in the writing process, spending time thinking about and honing your dialogue is never wasted. Dialogue is hard, because we want it to sound like the kind of thing a human might actually say – but one who lives in a book and so doesn’t um and er, start one sentence and finish another, or lose track halfway through what they’re saying. It’s all too easy to make dialogue sound stilted and overly formal – but equally easy to make it sound overly casual and informal to the point that no one is really saying anything at all.
In short, you want dialogue to sound the way we think we really speak, rather than the way we actually speak or the way we write. Plus you want every character to feel distinct, and as if their dialogue matches their personality/upbringing/class/situation. Easy, right?
You have heard, I’m sure, the advice to read dialogue aloud – which is good advice, and I give it myself often. But here are some more in-depth tricks to help move your dialogue from fine to crackling with life – and to make sure that dialogue is never just dialogue, but also develops characters, advances the plot, increases tension, and shares necessary information without info dumping.
Because you can have the best plot in the world, but if your dialogue isn’t right, your novel will never quite hit the mark.
Something I notice a lot in my submissions inbox is dialogue that is too on the nose. Characters just say exactly what they mean, and everything is laid out on the page. Sometimes you might want that – you get more thump from a character suddenly saying something bluntly if you do it rarely – but mostly you want there to be space for the reader and the characters to fill in around what is said.
An author who is exceptionally good at dialogue and particularly subtext is Emily Henry. All of her protagonists are whip-smart and the conversations she creates between love interests are full of crackle and spark. But even though it’s clear to us all that there is attraction between characters, no one is actually saying that – and isn’t that how it works in real life? We meet someone we like, we tiptoe around each other not quite saying what we really mean – and yet we all know.
So in Happy Place, when Wyn asks Harriet, “Why do you always start cleaning when I come into the room?”, we know that he’s not really asking why she always starts cleaning when he comes in the room: he’s telling her that he’s noticing something that he thinks means she likes him, and giving her room to play along or shut him down.
At the end Harriet leaves early in the morning to catch a plane, leaving Wyn behind, but instead rushes back through the airport to get back to him, only to find he has also rushed to the airport to find her. “Did you drive all the way here to say goodbye?” she asks, and he answers, “Why aren’t you on the plane?” It’s obvious he has driven here to say goodbye! But when he answers with a question of his own – another question with an obvious answer – though he doesn’t use those exact words, he’s telling her exactly why he’s here: the same reason she is.
But subtext doesn’t only exist in romantic dialogue: you can add in subtext anywhere you want to up the tension, by leaving gaps between what characters say and what we know they mean. That might be a veiled threat – ‘I’d hate for something to happen to you if you don’t tell me the truth’ – or having characters talk about anything but what we know they really want to talk about.
If all your dialogue is characters saying exactly what they mean, it is unlikely to be either realistic or add tension.
Another sign of well-crafted dialogue is that it does more than one thing at once. Take these lines from Tana French’s In the Woods, where Ryan and Cassie are about to start interviewing a suspect:
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