Realistic Dialogue

Good morning and welcome to Monday Blogs. Today, we’re going to be talking about realistic dialogue.
When I first embarked on my writing career, I faithfully took online courses, researched how the best way to write a book was, and took all that advice to heart. My office was soon exploding with all the notes I’d taken, references I worked hard to follow. After all, the people giving this advice had to know what they were doing. They claimed to be experts in the field and I was so very new that I needed to know how to present my stories to magazine and book publishers.
One thing that was emphasized by certain sites over and over was that you couldn’t use contractions, not even in dialogue. This was the polar opposite of what I’d been learning in my creative writing classes, but I figured these people were experts and knew what they were talking about. So, I went through my stories and made sure there were no contractions at all. None.
Needless to say, my characters didn’t sound natural. What I had thought was a tightly written story now sounded stilted, stiff. But I wasn’t the expert so therefore, I needed to follow their advice. Right?
Wrong…
Not much later, I had the chance to get advice from a published author. Her words were to forget what all these experts were saying and just write the story, as it came from my heart. At that point, I heard the truth of her statement. She was selling her work with contractions in it all the time. I got to work and put contractions back in my work. I spent time around people, listening to them talk, to make my dialogue more natural.
In essence, there are rules of writing you need to ignore. The one about no contractions is one of those rules. Readers don’t want to wade through a book where there are no contractions. That’s not how they talk and think. So, slip in a few contractions. Make your writing be more natural.


About the K.C. Sprayberry
Born and raised in Southern California’s Los Angeles basin, K.C. Sprayberry spent years traveling the United States and Europe while in the Air Force before settling in northwest Georgia. A new empty nester with her husband of more than twenty years, she spends her days figuring out new ways to torment her characters and coming up with innovative tales from the South and beyond.
She’s a multi-genre author who comes up with ideas from the strangest sources. Those who know her best will tell you that nothing is safe or sacred when she is observing real life. In fact, she considers any situation she witnesses as fair game when plotting a new story.
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