Here’s a little tidbit for you – writing isn’t real. It’s true. Writers create fantastical places, people and events to titulate and entertain. And we most certainly never base things on real people or events unless it’s a biography. 

Scouts honour. 

But how do we convince people to get invested in clear make belief? I know when my nephew whines that his imaginary friend is hungry, I’m not jumping into the kitchen to whip up some homemade tacos. Harold could stand to lose a few pounds there. He’s clearly been engorging himself on one too many many breakfast waffles. 

However, for our stories, we seek to create a sense of verisimilitude. This is a very complex topic and one of the primary pillars of storytelling. So there’s no way I can properly discuss it in one blog post. Or three for that matter. It’s a real art of giving your creative work a sense of reality or truthfulness and there are a lot of tools in which you can produce it.

Today, I’m going to tell you how to avoid one. 

The goal of writing isn’t to reproduce an exact copy of real life. Readers really don’t want to get bogged down in the minutia of someone’s day-to-day activities. It’s why so few stories have people go to the bathroom. Or fixing dinner. 

There is one pitfall, however, that beginner writers might tumble down. And that’s in trying to capture the peculiar speech patterns of real life dialogue.

My advice is simple: don’t.

If you actually sit and record someone speaking, it’s a little painful to listen to on playback. There’s a lot of pauses, stammerings, filler words and sounds as well as random tangents that don’t go anywhere. Real life conversations are messes. Please don’t try to replicate them. No one wants to read through a transcript of verbal tics and noise. 

So don’t stuff your writing with “um,” “like,” “ah,” and “you know.”

You can use a small sprinkling, think of it like salt, to add just a dash of flavour to one character or so. But excess use of verbal noise and repetition makes dialogue really hard to read and, ironically, less organic. No one talks in real life like people do in novels. Just like no one talks like the characters on Gilmore Girls. But it’s this novel creativity that gets people interested and attentive. 

If life weren’t so boring, we wouldn’t want to read and listen to the tales of storytellers to escape it.

So, when writing your dialogue ask yourself:

Is there too much unnecessary filler in my character’s dialogue? 

If my character has a verbal tic, am I overusing it to the point of annoyance?

Can I cut any words from the dialogue to keep it short and snappy while still maintaining the necessary information?