I got lost in the accompanying narrative, the setting, the characters’ activities, movements, body language, or overwrought cleverness. Sometimes I bogged down in the minutiae of sighing, nodding and eye gazing. Writers can get so caught up visualizing each detail of character interaction they rob readers of their mental interplay, their own visualizations based on common human experience. We presume readers don’t know how a character might deliver a line in a given situation. The stream of dialog reads as dammed up where it should flow. It loses its surface tension, its sparkle, and its undercurrent. It becomes stagnant.

Poorly managed narrative is part of the problem. Most dialog needs a little helping narrative to aid the reader’s orientation in the scene. Too much can create pauses that aren’t natural and interrupt the pace. Too little can cause the characters to move too quickly from one topic to another, making them appear to suffer from attention deficit disorder. Narrative placed well and in the right amounts creates natural pauses and shifts in dialog and action that don’t mimic but create life—the life of the story. The right narrative enhances the rhythm. It provides a satisfying ending to one scene, breaks that shift the topic or course of dialog within the scene, and a smooth transition into the next, all while holding the tension that keeps a reader turning pages. A good story follows the characters to precisely the places the reader needs them to go. To the reader it feels like a natural course of events, purely believable—no matter how the writer had to agonize in order to get there.

One dialog overhaul method that works for me is to copy the scene into an empty document, then strip out everything but what’s inside quotation marks. This allows me to start from the basic dialog. I trim that to its essentials, then work up to just the right helping narrative. If there’s a lot of action occurring at the same time as the dialog, it might help to strip that down as well, in a separate document—or as separate paragraph blocks differentiated by color in the same document—then work at merging the two into a cohesive whole. It’s easier, using this strip-down technique, to find where something is said that isn’t needed or doesn’t fit because it’s redundant, tangential, or just bad writing.

I read the characters’ words out loud and get a feeling for what they’re communicating underneath it all—to each other as well as the reader. How does the conversation flow? What’s needed and what isn’t, and in what order? Is there a shorter, snappier and more natural way to say something? Are all these words in character? Can I hear and differentiate the voices? Is the purpose of the scene being met? Am I missing an opportunity for humor, or drama? What are the characters saying between the lines, or what might someone mistake them for saying if I’m not careful? Why are they droning on, when what they need to say can be compressed into two lines of speech?

When I stop to think about it, I realize this is how I write dialog in a burst of inspiration. Just the speech, in a series of lines on paper, with a pencil, scribbling as fast as I can to get it all down before I lose the thread and my place inside the heads of the characters. The best dialog I’ve ever written has come to me that way. Why not force inspiration, by writing it that way to begin with?