The Thin Line Between Realistic and Too Realistic Dialogue

Today I had a typical conversation with one of my friends at work. It went something like this:

Trish bursts into my office. “Are you okay with lunch at The Orient?”
“What?” I said, because I genuinely didn’t hear her since I was listening to an audio book.
“The Orient.”
“What?”
“The Orient?”
“Why do you keep saying The Orient to me?”
She laughs. “Are you good with lunch from The Orient?”
“Do I have to go get it for everyone?” (I’m the designated lunch getter since I don’t see patients.)
“No.”
“Then I don’t care where we eat.”

So this is a prime example of how real people converse…sometimes-lol. Although I’ve never understood why people simply repeat the last word when they’ve asked a question and someone didn’t hear them. Still, we wouldn’t want to write anything like the above interaction, nor would we want to read it.

Some people have very distinct and sometimes horrifying ways of speaking, or slaughtering the English language. Even as one side of me squirms when I hear someone ask, “Where you been at?” there’s another part of me that thinks of a character who might speak like that. I think there’s a fine line between making dialogue real and making it too real.

If someone speaks broken English, it would be hard to write—and read—a whole page of dialogue with figgerin’ and nuffin’ and dunno’s all throughout it.

So here’s a bit of dialogue from one of my current works, DWELLERS, tell me what you think. And feel free to put some of your dialogue in the comments where you may have a character speaking in broken language or has an unusual way of speaking. I’d love to read it!

This is a conversation involving Britta (the heroine), Gareth (the hero), and Keo (the leader of the strangers they’ve just met). Keo has a bit of a lazy drawl and a southern twang. I wanted to make his way of speaking a bit different and hopefully it shows.
~*~

“So the government still exists?” I ask.

“Course.” Keo pinches the area between his brows. I know my questions are inane to him, but there’s a lot I don’t know.

He continues. “Renegade soldiers been herdin’ Dwellers south, anywhere below Virginia. They plan to blow this place off the map in ‘bout four weeks, last I heard. So that means we got a week, but I’m outta here in three days tops.”

Gareth looks at Keo like he can’t understand the language Keo is speaking. “How the hell do you herd Dwellers?”

Keo barks out a laugh. “Trust me, you don’t wanna be face to face with a Renegade soldier. They ain’t nothing nice, and I might add, they the only ones allowed to drive, other than a few licensed poachers. Anything that’s not in a Renegade uniform is an enemy and they don’t ask questions—capture or kill. Believe me, you don’t wanna be captured.”

“They’ll kill even humans?” I ask.

“I repeat, capture or kill. Best thing to do when a Renegade is near…run, hide, pray.”
I’m not sure I want to know, but I ask anyway. “What do they do with captures?”

“Experiments. Stuff like they did with the Dwellers.”

~*~
I really like writing dialogue, but it’s one of the things that intimidate me too. Not as much as writing scenerymakes me squirm, but with dialogue, I want to make sure I capture the flow and the natural breaks without making it too chunky, or having it be too wordy. So now, I pay attention to how I speak and sometimes I’ll play over conversations I’ve had in my head and ask, “Would that look right on a page?” Most times the answer is, no.