Sandra Wendel - October 2, 2025 - 5 min. read

Dialogue Writing Tips! 6 Little-Known Hacks

What did Taylor say to Travis in the skybox at the football game? Or Trump to Putin on the red carpet in Alaska? We couldn’t hear these exchanges, or read lips, but we knew emotions were in play – and that’s exactly why dialogue writing tips matter so much when recreating such moments on the page.

Body language can often tell you what’s transpiring between speakers.

And when it comes to writing dialogue tips for your next romantacy or legal thriller and even your memoir, your challenge is to get the emotion in the dialogue as you paint the scene your readers cannot see. How?

Act it out.

You can pretend you’re acting out those types of scenes. You play all the parts. Talk out loud. Address the other person in the scene. Write the screenplay, literally. Use different voices.

I advise you to do this enactment, not at a coffee shop, but in a private space because someone will surely think you’re a lunatic and call the proper authorities.

Get real about writing dialogue.

Reading dialogue aloud in various voices is a way to check the realism of the speech itself. You’ll find yourself creating more contractions, choppier sentences. Fragments. Because that’s the way we talk. When was the last time you spoke in a sentence that required a semicolon? Like, never.

And speaking of the word like, let’s keep it to a minimum even though we are hearing this word interjected in spoken language, like, all the time. Just listen to your friends talking. Or have a conversation with a thirteen-year-old – and pay attention to practical dialogue writing tips that make conversations come alive. Good luck with that too.

Eavesdrop on real convos.

If you really want to go for more realism, park yourself in a jam-packed airport boarding gate (which is harder to do these days because of security, so you better have a ticket and be going somewhere yourself), in a crowded coffee shop, on mass transit, at the gym, in a loud restaurant or bar, college campus—anywhere people congregate and chat.

You can pick up nuances in speech, snippets of mysterious conversations (fodder for plotlines), accents, and get a sense of how people talk. Sometimes people don’t —. In other words, sometimes people don’t finish sentences. They don’t answer questions directly. They might use words you have never used before.

Use body language to show (and not tell) when appropriate.

Write the silence. The hesitation. A one-word retort. Not long, chatty discourse. An eye roll. A shoulder shrug. A sigh. Tears. Smiles.

You’ll be sensitive to dialogue in your own writing when you pay attention and are not part of the conversation yourself. Just observe, grasshopper—as my many yoga teachers would remind us.

Don’t lie to me.

People-watching is sometimes fun when you can’t hear what people are saying and you are simply observing the body language. I don’t understand those micro expressions and how people can read fleeting emotion on faces. Which is why I’m bingeing the popular TV show Lie to Me again. But gestures and arm movements, sitting positions (open and closed), even the placement of feet (toward the speaker or away) tell a lot about the conversation. Drop these clues prudently in your own writing.

Other places to observe and overhear conversation in real life are these:

Doctor’s office waiting room
Grocery store (lots of little movies being played out with kids in the carts)
Waiting in line just about anywhere
A rock concert or political rally
Bleachers at a sporting event
Small talk before an office meeting either on Zoom or in person
Shopping mall food court (are those still a thing?)
Classroom before and after class
Sidewalk café where tables tend to be close to each other
Someone speaking on their iPhone walking down the sidewalk
Picnickers in the park

Does this text look real LOL?

More and more, we’re seeing text exchanges used in novels because that’s how we are communicating with each other. People talking with their thumbs is quite different, however, from actual dialogue.

[As an aside, with my editor hat on, we are still not sure how to design these missives. Should we put the texts in thought bubbles or set them apart as separate lines in a different font? This is a question for your book’s interior designer. As an editor, I advise you to make sure the reader knows who is texting (add tags). As a reader, I advise you to keep these to a minimum. They are distracting.]

Just make sure your texts are authentic. By that I mean, texts are often short, missing words, have misspelled words (*corrected words), and awkward punctuation, if any. Emoji and plenty of LOLs and Hahahahas. Go for authenticity and brevity here.

As anyone who has written fiction and reconstructed scenes for memoir knows, detail and dialogue are your best friends — and that’s where smart dialogue writing tips can make all the difference.

Real people talking in real language, even with texting, moves the story along without dipping too far into the “telling” side of “show don’t tell.”

If you’d like to dive deeper into the craft of writing and publishing, you’ll find more practical insights and strategies in my book Cover to Cover, available on Amazon.

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