Learn to write dialogue by watching TV
Before I get into this post, I want to clarify a couple of things:
- This post is aimed at writers of prose fiction (e.g. short stories or novels), since that is what I write.
- There is only so much that writers of prose fiction can and arguably should attempt to learn from television. Literature and television are fundamentally different forms of media, with success criteria that overlap in some areas and wildly diverge in others. Lincoln Michel and Brandon Taylor are just two of the many astute commentators who have pointed out the shortcomings of writing that derives too much of its artistic approach from TV and film.
With that out of the way --
I learned to write better dialogue by watching lots of TV.
Dialogue was a weakness of mine for many years. When I turned in stories for workshop during my college creative writing classes, I would often receive feedback like, "This dialogue is a bit blah," or "I couldn't track who was saying what." I began to dread writing dialogue, anticipating that whatever words I put in my characters' mouths would inevitably fall into the trap of being either boring or outlandish. Worse, I felt like the criteria other people used to judge the quality of dialogue was beyond my grasp. I could not understand what distinguished good dialogue from bad. For a long time I thought I never would.
Then I started watching Succession. For those unfamiliar, Succession is an HBO series about a family of extremely wealthy assholes who own a media company. They speak to each other in a near-constant stream of profane insults, industry jargon, and familial shorthand. Each character has particular vocal and linguistic quirks that an observant (or obsessed) viewer will quickly learn: Kendall's "uh, uh" stuttering; Logan's rage-intensified Scottish accent; Tom's penchant for bizarre and often inappropriate turns of phrase.
It is easy to pick up on the dialogic patterns in Succession -- or, I'd argue, in any decently well-written TV show -- because dialogue is most of what happens on TV. In real life, it's easy to have an hour of your day go by without saying anything aloud or hearing another person speak. Not so on television: an hour-long episode is packed full of arguments, monologues, jokes, questions, commands, explanations, pleas, threats, tirades, and all sorts of other fun speech modes that most of us don't necessarily get to hear in our everyday lives. TV characters talk constantly and voluminously and, often, with dizzyingly heightened stakes. Even setting aside the particular stakes of a given story that a TV character might be part of, every word they say tells us something crucial, precisely because spoken language is so much of what constitutes television as a medium. TV dialogue is a high-pressure art. It must be baseline successful in order for the finished product to even exist.
I think a lot of beginning prose writers who struggle with dialogue get into a kind of vicious cycle, where they know they're bad at writing dialogue, so they write stories that don't include a lot of dialogue, and then they don't get any practice writing better dialogue, so their dialogue skills get worse. One of the reasons this sort of cycle is possible is because dialogue in prose fiction is not under the same kind of pressure as TV dialogue. It doesn't need to be there for a piece of prose fiction to qualify as such. There are lots of stories, even entire novels, that don't include a single line of dialogue. Prose writers can get away with dialogue that's a little blah, or unrealistic, or inconsistent, simply because they don't have to include a lot of it in their finished product. This is certainly one solution to the problem of struggling to write dialogue: just don't do it very much.
I'd argue, though, that any prose writer who wants to get serious about writing better dialogue should watch a lot of TV and study its dialogue. Pay special attention to patterns, and then to moments when these patterns are broken. Why do characters sound the way that they do? Do they ever say one thing and mean another? How do you know? Do they speak a certain way to a particular character that they don't to other characters? How would you describe their speech in sonic terms?
And then try to keep what you learn from this exercise in mind as you write your own dialogue. Imagine that each line of dialogue you construct is under the same kind of pressure as it would be on a TV show. Imagine that what your characters say constitutes who they are. Think about how to tell the reader as much as possible about what's happening in your story within each sentence -- each word -- that your characters speak. You are going to fail at writing great dialogue the first several times you try to do this, obviously; failure is an inevitable part of doing something new. But over time, with enough observation and thought and practice, your dialogue will improve. At least, that's what happened to me.