The trick that fixed my dialogue pacing after 6 months of flat scenes

I kept writing conversations where characters sounded like they were reading a script. Turns out I was cutting every piece of small talk and filler. I tried adding in just two or three lines of stuttered words or interruptions per scene, and suddenly my beta readers at the Austin writers group actually felt like they were listening to real people talk. Has anyone else had luck with a specific rule for how much filler to leave in?

2 comments

2 Comments

oscarmurray15d ago

Heard a playwright talk about this at a bar once. Said real conversations are like a ping pong match with bad players. People miss the ball. They hesitate. They repeat themselves. Too much polish kills the rhythm. I started adding one stutter or one restart per page. Not more than that. It works because people don't talk clean. They stumble.

val_wilson14d agoMost Upvoted

Three or four stutters is my max too, but I've been thinking about where you put them. Does @oscarmurray find a big difference depending on if you drop it at the beginning of a line versus in the middle of a sentence? I always thought that worked best when someone is trying to correct themselves, like when they start with the wrong word. But a hesitation in the middle feels more like a real person gathering their thoughts, especially if they're nervous or lying. I'm curious if you've noticed one spot feels more natural than the other, or if it just depends on the scene.