
How to Create Realistic Dialogues?
In the previous articles, we wrote something interesting about dialogues.
We now know what their functions are and what a subtext is. A short tip: if you lost them, you can get these fundamental points back thanks to our Dialogue Series.
But how can you create realistic dialogues?
First things first, a clarification needs to be done. There is a difference between dialogues in real life and dialogues in fiction.
Let’s see it in detail.
What are realistic dialogues?
Dialogues in fiction have to be realistic, not real.
When you read dialogue, and it sounds like a real and natural conversation, you easily understand that this is a realistic one.
Each line of dialogue must pass a piece of information, implicit or explicit. Implicit information is intuited by the reader, and it is not expressed by words. On the contrary, explicit information is clearly declared.
Taking inspiration from a spoken dialogue or a real conversation is never a good idea because this risks misleading the structure of realistic dialogues.
If you want to create realistic dialogues, you need to understand what are their opposite: real-life dialogues.
What are real-life dialogues?
Have you ever noticed a non-realistic dialogue? It may happen in novels but also movies, or plays of poor quality.
You can recognize artificial dialogues by their unrealistic nature. They seem more forced ways of speaking that make everything unrealistic, fake, and also a bit irritating.
On the other hand, in real life, dialogues have some characteristics:
- They are full of interruptions, repetitions and digressions
- Most of the time the goal is to pass the time
- They are based on topics of minor importance
Starting from the first bullet point, try this simple exercise: record a dialogue between two people in your daily life and write it down. You will see that there are many pauses, of digression words that in a fiction dialogue there cannot be.
In fact, translating an oral dialogue into a written one, for a novel, makes it unbelievable and unadventurous.
Moreover, the goal of dialogue in the real-life, most of the time, is just to pass the time. We often speak to have a chat, with someone at the bar, at the bus stop, or in the queue at the supermarket checkout.
This kind of dialogue is mostly based on worthless topics as the weather, the latest news, or about seasons in general.
How to create realistic dialogues: suggestions
Now that writers know what to avoid in writing your realistic dialogues, they need to focused on punctuation.
Well, in a realistic dialogue there is the right use of commas, full stops, and suspension points.
In addition to that, alternate dialogues with descriptions. A very long dialogue without the description does not engage the reader but bores him and does not reflect the characteristics of a realistic dialogue.
Lastly, keep in mind that the information given in a dialogue is never addressed to the reader but to the character involved in the conversation. In this way, you can avoid that a character will say things that another one already knows.
Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.
Alfred Hitchcock
bibisco helps you to create realistic dialogues
As we have seen, there are some important things to keep in mind to create realistic dialogues. In fact, a non-realistic dialogue just taken from real life can risk spoiling the narrative, making the conversation banal and boring the reader to the point of not continuing reading.
Thanks to the innovative novel writing software of bibisco you can find the right way to create authentic, realistic dialogues and involve your reader.

Conclusions
To create realistic dialogues one of the most important things is to understand the difference between a real-life dialogue and a realistic one which is intended to give information to the protagonists, to make the narrative interesting and lively but also to encourage the reader to read the story in one go.