Sorry, my dialogue kind of sucks as well. There are these two characters in particular- their conversations go off on such random tangents it’s really sad.

^This. Also, try reading funny dialogue and figuring out what makes it funny. I can’t give any other advice without seeing a sample of your stuff.

My creative writing teacher had us listen to other people’s conversations and copy them down secretly so we could learn how people naturally talk.

Sorry, my dialogue kind of sucks as well. There are these two characters in particular- their conversations go off on such random tangents it’s really sad.

You show flashes. In the chunk I was working on this past week(that I’m still not done with :/), there’s a point at which I felt compelled to praise you for it, which I don’t really do that often. It was something like the queen referring to the king as her husband instead of the king, and in context it was just a wonderful touch. The reader knows based on previous experiences with the queen that it’s not a sign of affection, and we can then infer it’s actually a subtle undermining, and not even in the intentional sense. She just has such a lack of respect for the king’s authority that it seeps into her words. It was perfect.

I think I’m okay at dialogue.

Ditto the flashes. I told you this way back when I critiqued it, but some of the lines you redid for Margaret were just flat-out fantastic.

I dunno how good my dialogue is, but it’s by far my favorite part of writing(description can go suck a fat one, I hate it). Sometimes I suspect it’s pretty good, when my leads are conversing about something mundane on one level, but are actually discussing heavier stuff that neither is really secure enough to engage outside of stealth metaphors, or my female lead is talking with Wise Old Monk and having what amounts to several conversations at once, with the topics both rotating and overlapping. Sometimes I suspect it’s not so good.

In terms of what I try to do when writing dialogue, well… I usually try to handicap my male lead’s banter level on purpose. He’s supposed to be too deliberate to keep up with rapid repartee in casual conversation, so most of his cleverer lines are either something he thinks of while fighting to gain some kind of strategic edge, or something he’s already come up with. I try not to give the reader too much information about him even during his PoV segments(which is pretty easy, since he compartmentalizes like a muh), so ideally, if the reader picks up on what I’ve been doing(and I can make sure it’s consistent), they’ll be able to look at his lines and say, “Hey, I can tell which of these things he’s put a lot of thought into, since his phrasing is suddenly a lot more elegant and he can articulate it better.”

Well, that, and I think making his sort of lowlife character ‘witty’ is really played out, and most of the ‘clever’ lines are just hollow pithiness, instead of timely, substantive observations. I think there’s a place for characters who do nothing but grab low-hanging fruit and fire off empty wisecracks to make themselves feel smart, but most of the time, writers actually think the things their characters are saying are smart. That shit bugs me.

Anyway… If you want to experience the best dialogue, watch The Wire. Just to make sure nobody misses it:

IF YOU WANT TO EXPERIENCE THE BEST DIALOGUE, WATCH THE WIRE.

Seriously, the dialogue is so much better than any other show I’ve watched, it’s almost a joke. I can pull out some examples if anybody wants, but my post is probably long enough as it is.

I’ve been passively studying how jokes / one liners / funny dialog is constructed, and I think the most important aspect is the cadence or the flow, or using the right words for the maximum effect. This generally means short and punchy, but it depends on the style of humor and the character. A great source of excellent comedic writing is The Onion headlines – not the articles, the headlines. I read a behind the scenes into the Onion, and they say they put about half of their work into the headline and the other half into the article.

Sometimes the premise alone is funny and the joke writes itself: NASA Inadvertently Launches Unmanned Space Shuttle

Another: 4 Dead, 12 Injured As Bull Wins Rodeo;
God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule;
Black Guy Asks Nation For Change;
CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years;
Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet;
Fun Toy Banned Because Of Three Stupid Dead Kids;
Fire Truck! Fire Truck! Fire Truck!

Many of these blaze into the realm of obscene, but that’s just the Onion.

Always remember the ironclad rule: Brevity is the soul of wit.

Yeah, I see what you mean about the barrel. I think we discussed inadvertent cleverness before, but it’s always an interesting topic.

I’ve always thought my dialogue comes off as unatural whenever I’ve tried. And I especially fail at medieval speech, which is quite the problem since I want to write a big fantasy trilogy I’ve been planning for a long time. I kind of want to actually write the series as if its a fantasy anime/cartoon like One Piece and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Because those are set in old fantasy worlds and yet everyone just speaks modernly. But that would probably not work for a book and would come across as lazy and undignified or something.

As for wit and humor, that’s what I want to try to go for my other story idea I might turn into a comic rather than a book, and I once typed a random list of what I hoped to be funny dialogue from random scenes throughout the story. A friend liked some of it I think. I’ve probably lost the file. Oh well… So I might be ok for wit/humor, but it will probably devolve into the kind of things most people end up saying in real life like “no you’re [whatever they said]!” and “thats what she said” to kind of make it semi-realistic because it is hard for most people to be witty in real life. Or at least thats how I think real life conversations tend to be. Maybe my friends and I are all dumbasses.

So yeah is there some website or book or something that really helps with fantasy talk? Or I could probably just read lotr or something and copy down how they talk.

My dialogue is probably distressingly modern as well…but I’m not worrying about it now. I try not to be too blatant, though if you think about it, the time period in my fantasy world only roughly correlates to the 19th century, so who says that they have to talk exactly like they did in the 19th century? Different world, different customs, different language. Just as long as no one says ‘That’s what she said’, it should end up all right. Same reasoning should pretty much apply to you, happycrab.

The hardest thing is people talking in slang in a work set in the past. I try to just make it sound more casual with grammatical errors here and there, because there’s nothing more annoying than Oliver Twist’s dialogue.

^^You can “add to dictionary” on words it doesn’t like. I do that sometimes, but usually, I just click “ignore.”

I have trouble with writing humor too. It’s very hard to figure out what makes funny things funny. I thought this was kind of interesting. I don’t know if it’s at all helpful though.