In this extract from her article for the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2025, Angela Clarke explores how to create authentic dialogue for characters.
It sounds obvious, but do your characters sound like real people? People very rarely talk in a grammatically correct, overly polite way, where they patiently wait for each other to finish.
‘How are you today, Mrs Smith?’
‘I am feeling very well today. Thank you. And you, how are you feeling, Mr Jones?’
That comes across as stilted, right? Perhaps it feels old fashioned, like it belongs in a novel published in the 1800s. It is also quite dull. Real people interject, cut over each other… People have their own focus, aims and motivations in each conversation they come to. Even if it’s as simplistic as one character – a patron – wanting their glass of wine to be refilled and to be left alone as soon as possible, and one character – a bartender – being bored and so wanting to flirt, there is a conflict at the heart of each exchange. And that gives you tension. And something for your reader or audience to become invested in. And, importantly, neither character is there simply to two-dimensionally service the plot or narrative arc of the other character.
Even if a character appears only briefly on your pages, they should be fully fleshed out, with their own desires and drives (ideally at odds with your protagonist’s wants – even if it’s low key). If you are redrafting or editing, watch for this. Often when we are telling ourselves the story (the first draft), we don’t have the creative capacity to make every secondary character who is found on the page feel authentic. Go back: fix this. If all your characters sound like actual humans, you won’t just bring them to life on the page, you will bring the whole world to life. You will make your reader or audience care.
Angela Clarke is a novelist and a screenwriter. She is the author of the bestselling crime thrillers On My Life (Hachette 2019), Trust Me (HarperCollins 2017), Watch Me (HarperCollins 2016) and Follow Me (HarperCollins 2015). She also wrote the humorous memoir Confessions of a Fashionista (Penguin Random House 2013). Follow Me was named Amazon’s Rising Star Debut January 2016, longlisted for the Crime Writer’s Association Dagger in the Library 2016, and shortlisted for the Dead Good Page Turner Award 2016. Angela is currently working on several new television developments: her screen credits as a writer include JoJo & Gran Gran (CBBC, series 2) and The Break (BBC Studios/BBC 3, series 5).
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