I struggle to write dialogue. I’m not a particularly talkative person in real life, at least with most people. And dialogue should, in theory, serve to either move the story forward or reveal it.

Because I struggle, I’ve read a number of guides that promised to teach me how to write dialogue. Some of them note this, and some of them don’t, but the most important rule I’ve found is this: natural dialogue is unnatural.

If you read the blog, you undoubtedly know that Kisstopher and I podcast every week, and we provide transcripts of these podcasts. So I have a direct comparison between how I naturally talk and how I think I talk. I repeat myself a lot more during actual conversation. We talk over each other. The tidy back-and-forth of fictional dialogue is mostly absent.

So while it can be useful to hear how people talk with the aim of picking up specific phrases — the way one person might say “know what I’m saying?” after every sentence and another might say “No” at the beginning of most sentences, even when agreeing — it is probably best not to write as people actually speak. Some repetition can create good prosody and rhythm, but dialogue is much more streamlined.

Write those words if you want. But then excise them. Nobody can see the awkward silences that would remain (unless you write those in, of course).