Writing good dialog means writing dialogue that seems natural even if it isn’t (because we don’t speak the way we write speech), that entertains, and that does a bit of work for the story, or for the characters. Dialogue is an excellent way to world-build, to flesh out your characters, and to get exposition into the story without just dumping it.
That doesn’t mean that every single line of dialogue you write has to be larded with purpose. Trying to make every single sentence spoken by your characters do plot work or offer back story will result in some pretty stilted and unhappy conversations in your book, and trust me: Stilted and unnatural aren’t words you want to hear in reference to your writing.
That’s why it’s important to relax a little with your dialogue. In real life, we have this stuff called small talk. Some people deprecate small talk as a waste of valuable existence, but the fact is it plays a vital role in our lives. Small talk is how we ease into conversations and situations. It grounds us in a universal pool of communication, a common ground from which to operate. So instead of deprecating small talk in your writing, embrace it.
Talk About the Weather
Small talk, humorous exchanges, the sort of chatter that doesn’t do any kind of plot work can be just as revealing as portentous dialogue that is just a series of info-dumps, anvilicious revelations, and dramatic reveals. You can learn a lot about a person from their small talk. You can learn how socially skilled they are, what their sense of humor is like, what they consider to be important.
While you certainly want to avoid lengthy exchanges of meaningless pleasantries, small talk is a great way to inject a bit of humor into your story and a great way to shade your characters with some complexity. If your character is in a tense, action-packed, hyper-real situation from page one the reader can get a little exhausted, and the best way to get your reader to think of your characters as people they care about is to give them a little sense of what they’re like when they’re not fighting demons or hunting foreign spies or solving crimes. And small talk is a great way to do that efficiently.
The urge to make every sentence a masterpiece of tension, drama, and plot twists can be considerable, but that book will read like a parody. If you want the big wham lines to land, you have to get small.