Dialogue is where a lot of otherwise good work gives itself away. Lines that are grammatical, complete, and directly responsive read as written rather than spoken, and readers hear that instantly even when they cannot articulate why a conversation feels artificial. Actual speech behaves quite differently.

The aim is not a transcript, which would be unreadable. It is a stylised version that keeps the rhythms of speech while removing the parts that only work aloud, and knowing which is which is most of the skill.

What real speech actually does

People interrupt themselves, change direction mid-sentence, leave clauses unfinished, and repeat words. They answer a different question from the one asked. They say the least important thing first and arrive at the point late, or never. None of this is a failure of communication; it is what communication sounds like.

A transcript of any real conversation is close to unreadable, which is why imitation has to be selective. What transfers well is the fragmentation and the indirection. What does not transfer is the repetition and the filler, which are tolerable in sound and exhausting on a page.

Do not answer the question

The fastest improvement available to most dialogue is to stop having characters answer each other directly. Somebody asks a question and the other says something adjacent, or asks a question back, or changes the subject. This reads as people rather than as an information exchange, and it creates the asymmetry that drives a scene.

It also does character work. What somebody avoids saying, and how they avoid it, describes them faster than any amount of direct statement. This is the gap between said and done described in the piece on chemistry.

Compression is your friend

Comic balloons are small, and that constraint is helpful rather than limiting. A line that has to fit in a balloon gets cut to its essential part, which is usually shorter and better than the first version. Long balloons also cover the drawing, which is the layout consideration raised in the piece on panel rhythm.

The discipline is to write the line, then remove the first half. A surprising proportion of dialogue begins with a run-up that the reader does not need, and cutting straight to the operative clause almost always sounds more like speech, not less.

Everybody should not sound the same

Give each character a distinct rhythm: sentence length, whether they finish thoughts, how formal they are, what they say when they are uncomfortable. Readers should be able to tell who is speaking with the balloon tails covered, which is a hard test that very few first drafts pass.

Vocabulary is the weakest way to do this and the most commonly attempted. Rhythm and evasion strategies are far more distinctive than word choice, and they survive translation and lettering, which idiosyncratic vocabulary frequently does not.

Dialogue in intimate scenes

This is where dialogue most often fails, usually by becoming either silent or explanatory. Characters who narrate their own feelings kill the scene, and characters who say nothing at all leave the drawing to carry everything. The useful middle is ordinary, slightly off-topic speech that the drawing contradicts or complicates.

Short and specific works best. One line that belongs only to these two people does more than a page of general dialogue, which is the specificity argument in the piece on what makes an explicit scene work.

Read it aloud

The check is to say the lines out loud. Anything that trips the tongue will trip the reader's inner ear, and constructions that look fine written frequently cannot be said at all. Reading aloud catches this in seconds and there is no substitute for it.

Better still, have somebody else read it while you listen. Hearing your own dialogue in another voice removes the intonation you were silently supplying, and what is left is what a reader will actually receive.

Making written lines sound spoken

Fragment the sentences, avoid direct answers, cut the run-ups, give each character a rhythm rather than a vocabulary, keep intimate dialogue ordinary and specific, and read everything aloud. Six habits, and together they account for most of the distance between written and spoken.

Characters here are fictional and unmistakably adult, as described in our editorial principles.