Dialogue
is not written speech.
Successful dialogue is a strange mixture of the actual and the imaginary. It doesn't sound exactly like real conversation (listen in on a real conversation full of stuttering and unfinished ideas for a few minutes and you'll hear why), but it reads like actual conversation. That is, it should seem realistic, like the sort of thing we might imagine these people saying in this sort of situation, only better, more focused, more alluring. On the other hand, written dialogue is not necessarily more revealing than speech. Good dialogue, as my friend Bob Butler says, does not say everything the character has on his mind at a given moment. It works toward the truth in the same way that we generally do, by fits and starts. A moment of revelation and great openness should generally be led up to, should be an emotional peak of the story.
Writers
use dialogue to build narrative tension.
Good dialogue has subtexts and tensions inherent in it. A story includes dialogue primarily because it helps advance the action, and if a scene is worth telling (as opposed to a quick summary--"Shelly told Nicole to meet her at the zoo") it needs to be dramatically interesting. For a tremendous example of this principle at work, read Hemingway's "Hills like White Elephants," a story which is almost nothing but dialogue. It's also good practice to try and construct a scene where one character has a secret or something he/she must communicate and we as readers know it. That plants the tension immediately.
Don't
get overly creative with the mechanics of dialogue.
The old standby--"he said/she said"--is still the best way of crediting dialogue, which after all is the purpose of dialogue tags. Getting creative with the dialogue tags ("he expostulated" or "she expounded") draws attention to the tags, not the dialogue. If you want to add vividness to your writing and choose strong verbs, do it elsewhere; I find I use "said" and "asked" almost exclusively. Vary how often you employ a tag based on the situation (if there are only two speakers and their mode of speech or emotional take on the scene differentiates them, you don't need many; if you have a cocktail party and the voices are all but interchangeable, you might need a lot). Vary the placement of the tag in the sentence a bit so you can add some variety to your style. And don't worry too much that there seem to be too many dialogue tags or that they're too repetitive, since readers will tend to read over them. It will probably be apparent --maybe even ludicrous--if you're overdoing it or becoming too repetitive with your dialogue tags.
Pass
the potatoes.
That is, don't speechify; keep readers immersed in the action of a scene of dialogue. My friend Elinor Lipman first discussed potato passing for me, and I've seized on it as a valuable concept since--as in Elinor's fiction--many of my characters converse around a dinner table. Here's what we mean by it: When readers read long passages of dialogue, they tend to be eased out of the dramatic flow of the story and to lose contact with what is happening in the story as these words are being delivered. But if the writer has someone pass the potatoes (literally or figuratively) while that character talks, the reader remembers that there are people sitting around the table listening and reacting and perhaps getting ready to answer. So don't present long blocks of dialogue (which are also unfriendly to the reader's eye); break them up with action and reaction.
Use
dialogue for exposition with caution.
While I remarked above that dialogue could be used to help readers orient themselves in relation to the story and its characters, this can be (and has been) done so badly so often that I offer words of warning. Don't present lots of exposition at once under the guise of dialogue. The following is a tremendously bad example of exposition masquerading as a dramatic exchange:
"I've been so lonely since my husband Ted died in 1991 of cancer. We had been happily married since 1965, when we met while I was working in the Kresge department store on Canal Street in New Orleans.""Of course, you poor dear. Thank goodness your son Frank immediately left his job in Pittsburgh as a computer programmer to move back into your house in the Garden District of New Orleans so that he could help you with your clinical depression. Of course, now you are caring for Frank because his wife deserted him and took the kids back to Pennsylvania after the doctor discovered in a routine test that he was HIV positive."
How can you avoid these exposition blues, especially if your dialogue is not as egregiously bad as this? Follow this rule of thumb: Never use dialogue to tell the reader things the characters already know. In our real-life conversations,we refer to past events, certainly, but we don't explain them because we already have them as a common point of reference. It would be better instead to give out hints and build up information gradually. We don't need to know everything that has happened in the past to begin the story.
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