How to write terrible dialogue

A 10-step guide to writing lousy dialogue, brought to you by an award-winning author.

Here’s how to write terrible dialogue, in 10 simple steps.

I. Study the greats.

Absorb the masterfully flat and corny dialogue of the Star Wars prequels, straight-to-TV movies, soap operas, and poorly written books. Never expose yourself to Sorkin or Shakespeare or Steinbeck. Protect yourself from the horrors of well-written dialogue, lest you pick up a thing or two from it.

Let the lazy writing wash over you. Learn from it. Imitate it. You may begin to notice the techniques these writers employ to make their dialogue so gloriously cringeworthy, such as having characters state their feelings and tell each other things they already know for the audience’s sake.

By the end of this tutorial, you will have learned several of these tactics, giving you a helpful head start. Some day, if you work hard enough, your writing too may be studied as a shining example of terrible dialogue.

II. Avoid talking to people.

You don’t want to know how real people talk. If you can’t carry on a fluid conversation, you’ll be at far less risk of writing one. This fits in well with the ideal lifestyle of a writer, since you should be spending as much time as possible in isolation and darkness.

Not talking to anyone will also help limit your understanding of the world, and the varied beliefs and speech patterns of the people in it. Your characters should all sound like you. By venturing into the outside world, you risk hearing a turn of phrase or exchange that could inspire you.

The only voices you hear should be the ones in your own head.

III. Use clichés.

There are so many wonderfully overused phrases to choose from. Why choose at all? Pack every one into your dialogue, and use them over and over again to really drive the point home that your characters have never had an original thought in their lives, and neither have you. If you ever find yourself thinking hard over what a character should say… you’re doing it wrong.

If you want to take this to the next level—which, of course, you do—don’t write a single original line of dialogue. Plagiarize everything. Or if that sounds like too much work, just make sure every sentence your characters speak sounds like it could’ve been plagiarized. Every line should make your reader think, “I’ve definitely heard that before.”

IV. Don’t write characters, write mouthpieces.

Your characters should be as thin and flat as the paper they’re written on. Here’s a simple rule of thumb to remember: write caricatures, not characters. There should never be any tension or conflict in your dialogue. The good guys should always be right and agree with each other, and the bad guys should always be cartoonishly wrong.

Regularly stop the story to let your protagonist indulge in a self-righteous monologue so they can preach the moral of the story to the villain, or just to the readers, who, of course, wouldn’t be able to figure it out otherwise.

Your readers should be able to see you pulling the strings. They should see the characters as puppets rather than people. The end result is that they’ll be utterly uninvested and detached from the story, which is exactly what you want.

V. Be as realistic as possible, in only the worst ways.

You know how a lot of real-life conversation is dull and meandering? Your job as a writer is to capture that on the page so your readers are subjected to excruciating small talk even in the escape of fiction. They should know they’re never safe from bland discourse about the weather.

End scenes as late as possible—stretch out dialogue to the fullest extent. Like all the worst real-world conversations, your dialogue scenes should feel interminable and awkward. There should be a palpable sense of time being wasted in every exchange between characters.

Filler words are a must-have in dialogue. Your characters should use so many ‘like’s and ‘um’s and ‘uh’s that they all sound like insecure teenagers.

VI. Pack in as much jargon as possible.

Confuse your reader, and yourself, to the greatest extent language permits. Make your dialogue flowery and verbose to the point of incomprehensibility. If something can be said in two words, your characters should say it in two hundred. Over-explain every element of your world down to the most irrelevant detail in page after page of lifeless monologue. Use fancy-sounding words in your dialogue without understanding what they mean. Interweave perspicacious parataxis with recondite apophasis.

In fact, you can jettison the bounds of language and make up nonsense words that do nothing to further the plot or worldbuilding. Construct meaningless jargon solely to clutter the page. Your characters shouldn’t even sound human.

VII. Exposition, exposition, exposition.

Exposition is when you tell the reader something they need to know about the plot or characters. Assume your readers aren’t intelligent, so you need to repeat things a lot. Remember, exposition is when you tell the reader something they need to know about the plot or characters.

Your characters should constantly be stating facts to each other, like walking Wikipedia pages that won’t shut up. Make them tell each other things they already know, in a transparent attempt to convey information to the reader alone. They’ll appreciate having it delivered to them repeatedly in such a ham-fisted manner.

Nothing should be conveyed nonverbally in your story. Pack your pages with monologues about what your characters are feeling, thinking, doing, what they’ve done, what they plan to do, what they had for lunch, what they had for breakfast, what they’re thinking about having for dinner—anything to fill the silence. You don’t want to give your characters, or your readers, a chance to breathe.

Your characters’ backstories should be explained in dialogue. Nothing should be left to the reader’s imagination—after all, it’s best to assume they don’t have one.

A bonus tip: repeat characters’ names in dialogue all the time. Your readers might forget mid-sentence who’s being spoken to, so always have your characters refer to each other by their names. Their full names, ideally. You could even throw in their role in the story.

VIII. Make all your characters sound the same.

Regardless of who your characters are, where they’re from, what their history is, they should all sound identical. Avoid doing any research into vocabulary specific to a character’s profession, time period, or place of origin. All your characters, from a medieval king to a futuristic robot, should sound just like you.

If multiple characters are speaking, the reader should have no idea who’s who. None of your characters should have unique verbal tics or favorite phrases. You should be able to swap lines of dialogue between characters without anyone noticing. All your dialogue should melt together into an unvaried, flavorless, and rather repugnant soup.

IX. Abuse dialogue tags.

“Said” is a beautifully simple word, which is why you should never use it. But since your characters will all sound the same, you need dialogue tags for every line they speak.

Your task is to think up the most ludicrous and needlessly circuitous ways of attributing dialogue. Don’t say your protagonist “asked a question,” say they “ponderously petitioned.” Don’t write “she said,” but “she orated.”

And to make it clear what your characters are feeling, tack on a mess of adverbs, analogies, and elaborate description. Your protagonist didn’t just “whisper”; he “susurrated faintly and quietly with a hint of deep sorrow like a melancholic wind whistling through the twisting caverns of a long-abandoned mid-to-late-eighteenth century coal mine haunted by the ghosts of child laborers.”

Allow me to provide another excellent example:

“Where is the weapon?” Jack barked vociferously through gritted teeth with barely suppressed rage burning like a metaphorical fire of emotional feelings.

“Why, you mean the weapon to destroy the world I have been designing in secret for the past ten years, five months, and seventeen days?” vocalized Bob with his mouth.

“Yes,” Jack asseverated acrimoniously.

X. Avoid subtext.

Your characters should always say exactly what they mean. No dialogue should serve more than one purpose. In fact, if you can, make your dialogue serve no purpose at all.

Melodrama is the opposite of subtext. It’s when more emotion and higher stakes are presented explicitly than are justified by the story and characters. That’s the spot you want your dialogue to land in—at least, when it’s not mind-numbingly dull.

Your characters should scream their feelings out loud. In emotional scenes, their dialogue should read like a bored psychiatrist’s report. To really make your reader feel the melodrama in their bones, crank every dial up to 11 and then some. Use exclamation points—the more, the better. Use all caps. Your dialogue should feel as vapid, overwrought, and brainless as an angry Twitter thread.

Do nothing in your story to earn these emotional outbursts. They should feel perfunctory, redundant, and over the top.

Subtext takes thought and consideration, and communicates information in interesting and engaging ways. It’s to be avoided at all costs. If your characters aren’t constantly telling the reader what they’re thinking and feeling, how is anyone supposed to follow the story? Deliver information to your reader with the subtlety of an eighteen-wheeler driving through their front door.

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Happy April Fools’ Day! This is the third year in a row I’ve made a terrible writing advice video for the occasion—you can watch it here. (Last year’s was “How to be a terrible writer,” and 2023’s was “How to write a terrible novel.”) The video includes several skits giving examples of how to implement these tips—I hope they can give you a laugh or two.