finleycooper•1mo agoProlific Poster

Can we talk about how I was writing dialogue wrong for like 5 years

Last Tuesday I was reading through some old short stories I wrote in college and every single piece had characters talking in these long, perfect paragraphs. Like nobody ever interrupted or said "um" or trailed off. Then I listened to my roommate on the phone with her mom for 20 minutes and realized real people talk in fragments and half sentences. I spent the whole rewrite adding in stutters, pauses, and people cutting each other off. It made my scenes feel alive for the first time. Has anyone else had a writing habit they thought was fine but turned out to be killing their work?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sean1mo ago

Started doing the same thing a couple years ago and it completely changed how my dialogue reads. I forced myself to write a scene where two people were arguing and made sure every line was either cutting someone off or trailing into nothing. The result was messy but it felt more real than anything I'd written before. Also started adding in physical reactions like people looking away or laughing mid sentence to break up the talking. Now I can't go back to those long clean paragraphs, they just feel dead on the page.

the_finley1mo ago

Happened to notice something nobody's pointing out though. When you make dialogue too realistic with all the ums and interruptions it can actually get really annoying to read after a while. I tried writing a whole scene like that once and my beta reader told me they wanted to throw the book across the room by page three.