How do I create believable dialogue for fictional characters?

Answer 1

Characters Speak (Dialogue)

Have you ever read a story where no one is talking? Me either. You are either listening to a conversation between two characters or a narrator is having a conversation with you, the reader. Novice writers often forget they are listening to someone who is characterized. If you have ever described a friend telling a joke or explaining a movie, then you have created a character. But our concern is the page, that blank white screen or sheet of paper daring us to make something original. Here are several ideas to consider: 1.) Dialogue is not to be taken lightly. You should always avoid cliched dialogue. For example, if Bob says to Mary, "Hi, Mary. How's it going." and Mary says, "Hi, Bob. I'm fine. I haven't seen you lately," then you have written cliched dialogue, terrible dialogue, a moment not worth reading. Real people might say those things in real life, but it is the mundane of life rather than the excitement we relish when reading a good story. 2.) Lots of fiction attempts dialect. The approach can be effective, but it can also stress out readers. Choose dialect carefully and don't overdo it. If you intend to create a character who speaks in a foreign language, use keywords that will reveal that character rather than trying to render the entire dialogue of a foreign speaker. Be wary of using too much slang, which can make characters seem cartoon or caricature-like; in other words, characters who are not believable. Avoid using phonetic spellings. Trying to get that right is almost impossible. 3.) Characters who converse with one another usually have something important to say. Those of us who desire to write and tell stories often pass up good opportunities for creating characters by not understanding the people we write about. Characters who speak in your fiction need to know something; they need to present readers with their kind of wisdom. Think about where your characters come from. Are they savvy urbanites, inner-city dwellers, farmers from the Plains states, miners from Appalachia, suburbanites, homeless people? All these backgrounds create something unique in the way people speak. I'm sure you can identify many more. Think of the five boroughs in New York City. Here are people who live near each other, but have a unique way of speaking. Valley girls and surfers from the West Coast have an identity. You can probably hear this in your town or city. When your characters speak, they do so with authority; they know something others do not. They have a certain kind of intelligence, or lack thereof, which creates their brand of wisdom. As a fiction writer, you can get a lot of mileage out of knowing how to present interesting characters.

Answer 2

This can be tricky, but also excitingly innovative! Basically, you just have to combine fantasy and reality in terms of creating fictional characters who look and sound at least a little bit normal in their demeanor. The language that they speak can be both unique and normal at the same time in terms of the characters themselves possessing and displaying quirks of any kind that show through in their conversations and quotes along the way. Based on who the characters are as people, animals, or other figures accordingly, their dialogue can be believable while fitting their literary personas on paper to a T through clever, crafty composition that can also be relatable/understandable to the readers while fitting within the context of the overall storyline itself from beginning to end. Looking at how characters of sorts respond to certain situations they are put in contextually and the other characters they have to deal with throughout the plot every step of the way can also help fuel the writer's imagination to design dialogue that would acutely reflect the underlying scenarios as if they were both realistic and slightly farfetched without being too much one way or the other throughout the process. A good, even balance of straightforwardness and abstraction helps a lot in such literary unveilings.

Good luck with the writing! I'm sure it will all turn out well. :)