Novelistic conversation is generally pared-back, focused and to the point, so it’s unlike real-life chat or TV-script-style talking. Anywhere your conversation reads like ordinary blow-by-blow chit-chat, or is incredibly detailed and contains lots of explanation, or goes on for a long time (more than a page with no breaks for scene setting or other detail), pare it right back. Any chapters, or chunks of chapters, devoted to talking or powered mainly by talking, need reducing.
The reason that casual chat works on TV is that the viewer is absorbing the backdrop to assess it for setting, time of day, time of year, characters, and tone in terms of danger or otherwise. So, what the characters are saying almost doesn’t truly matter at times, because we’re taking cues from the visual detail. Novels and short stories don’t have this luxury. They don’t come with an easy backdrop; the reader has to work hard to build them mentally, so no words can be wasted.
Likewise, mouthpiece conversation (where facts are conveyed in a big tranche) can be easier to take on board when we’ve also got a visual to occupy us, than when it appears in written fiction with nothing else to layer it up.
Dialogue-led scenes can be improved by adding light-touch description to remind the reader where the characters are situated. Show us what the character can see, hear, or feel – shadows moving across the walls, the ticking of a wall clock, a car backfiring in the street, the play of the sun across water or through glass – anything at all to break up the talking with short, light touches.
Short stories can support quirky dialogue layout (such as a lack of speech marks), because the reader isn't being asked to concentrate for long. Novels, on the other hand, need to stick to traditional speech layout, because it becomes tiring for a reader to navigate huge tracts of prose without being sure who is saying what. The small number of novels which don't stick to this rule are generally not a great influence for debut writers still learning the ropes. Keep it easy for your reader - keep your speech layout clear.
Read as a writer (see article, here) to scratch underneath your favourite sections of dialogue in any recently-published novel or short story, to see how the writer has done it. If the dialogue loses your attention anywhere (and it sometimes happens!), make a note of where, and try to work out why – whatever conclusions you draw, feed these back into your own work, so that you're continually evolving your understanding of what works best and why.
Happy Writing!
13th July 2024