5 Tips from a top editor to make your work better!

By Alexandra Donald

Working full-time as an editor in fiction and memoir, I often see the same issues crop up in people’s writing. This blog post is going to focus on dialogue, which is a tricky issue to get right for many writers.

Dialogue Must Sound Natural and Move the Story Forward

Dialogue must always sound natural, but must also perform the function of moving the story forward. Two characters having a non-consequential conversation consisting of small talk, no matter how well written, will bore the reader. And conversely, if the dialogue is moving the story forward but sounds stilted and forced, the reader will notice that too.

Overusing Character Names

A common issue in writing dialogue is your characters overusing each other’s names. Think about having a conversation in your own life, with anyone from your best friend to a neighbour; you rarely use their name after your initial greeting. Dialogue should be similar. I often see characters in a piece of writing using each other’s names in every sentence; this is unnatural and distracting.

Info Dumping

Another issue is the ‘info dump’. If you haven’t yet come across this phrase, info-dumping is where the writer gives a huge amount of background information in a way that is completely unnatural. This can happen a lot in sci-fi or fantasy where the writer is world-building and wants the reader to know as much as possible about the world they have created, or in crime fiction where the writer needs to fill in backstory. However, if you try to do this in dialogue, you end up with characters monologuing for pages in a way that is false to the ear and frustrating for the reader. It is always better to drip feed information, and to show not tell. There is a great quote attributed to Chekov which states: ‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.’ Always remember this in your writing and especially when trying to write good dialogue.

Inconsistent Character Voice

Another issue I have come across is dialogue that is inconsistent with the character. For example, if you have a character who is an upper-middle-class middle-aged woman from a conservative background, having her curse like a truck driver in daily conversation is inconsistent with the character you have written and the reader will be thrown. 

Readability Over Realism

Finally editing conversation for readability is key. Often writers will use incomplete sentences, ellipses, and filler words like ‘um’ and ‘er’ to accurately represent how people speak, however too much of this will turn the reader off. Of course you want your characters to sound natural, but you have to make sure the dialogue reads well too. The occasional stumble or filler word is fine, but constantly using them is something I would avoid.

A great way to ensure that dialogue sounds natural is to read it out loud. I always recommend having three stages in your self-editing process; reading it on screen, printing it and reading it on the page, and reading it out loud. This three-step process will ensure that you catch unnatural dialogue, word repetition, and a lot more besides.

About the writer

Alexandra Donald has worked firstly as a copywriter and secondly as an editor for over ten years. She has worked with independent presses in Ireland including The Lilliput Press and Mercier Press, and with educational publishers including CJ Fallon. She has also worked with many individual authors on commercial fiction, literary fiction, and romance. And she has worked with writers on memoir, which has included sensitive subjects such as addiction and child abuse. In her spare time, Alex is a voracious reader, a cinema goer, a dog lover, and a yoga enthusiast.