Dialog

Dialog is the primary way most of us communicate with each other, so it's also the main way our characters communicate with each other. It's really hard to write a satisfactory short story that has no dialogue at all, and the longer this story, the harder it is to tell without ever having one character talk to another.

But dialog in fiction isn't a transcription of actual speech. It's not even an imitation of real speech. It's a model of the way real people talk to each other, a model that's b...