Dialogue rules really boil down to some basic, commonsense writing tips.
To write good dialogue, just listen to how people talk. You might even want to take notes, though I recommend discretion or you could wind up with fodder for a story you don’t want to star in. I know telling you to listen probably sounds painfully obvious, but if more people followed that advice I wouldn’t be reading dialogue that goes on for three lines before the writer introduces a period. People don’t talk in super long sentences. And the only people who talk in paragraphs are the ones you want to get away from as quickly as possible. Your readers will have the same reaction.
Don’t try to disguise exposition as dialogue. Again, that’s not how we talk. The only way you can get away with this is when you create an argument between two characters. Watch pretty much any movie or TV show and you’ll see what I mean. Hollywood uses this trick all the time.
Break up your dialogue by showing what your characters are doing while they’re talking or by sharing their body language. If this were real life, you would see that during the conversation. You want your readers to do the same.
Keep your dialogue tags simple. Using he said or she said may seem repetitive, but you want to draw attention to the dialog itself, not to the cool verb you used after the dialog. And whatever you do, never ever cap off your dialog with a verb that is unrelated to speech. I don’t care what the content of the dialog is in the examples below. People can’t sigh, laugh, smile or smirk their words. They can only say them with a sigh, a laugh, a smile or a smirk.
WRONG: “____________________,” he sighed.
RIGHT: “____________________,” he said with a sigh.
WRONG: “____________________,” he breathed.
RIGHT: “____________________,” he said, drawing in a long, slow breath after he’d spoken. (I don’t know how you’d manage to breathe in while speaking anyway.)
WRONG: “____________________,” he laughed.
RIGHT: “____________________,” he said with a laugh.
WRONG: “____________________,” he smiled.
RIGHT: “____________________,” he said with a smile.
WRONG: “____________________,” he smirked.
RIGHT: “____________________,” he said with a smirk.
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