I think that dialog functions best when you pay attention to what each of the characters wants, or what they are trying to get out of a certain scene.
For example: Main character is looking for a friend who has gone missing. He stops at a coffee shop and asks the barista if the if she has seen his friend.
Now, we know what the main character is looking for in this scene: he wants to ascertain the whereabouts of her missing friend. Thus, all of his dialog will be focused on getting to that point. He's going to start by asking very specific questions. (He probably won't even bother to introduce himself, and might even skip the friendly "hello" and just start asking questions once he has the barista's attention.) But what about the barista? What motivation guides her dialog? Maybe the barista is looking at the long like of people behind our protagonist, and her motivation is ending the conversation as quickly as possible to keep things moving along. Maybe the barista is having a conversation with someone on her phone, and resents the fact that the protagonist has interrupted that. Or maybe the barista sees the look of worry and concern on our main character's face, and wants to do everything she can to figure out what has him so upset, and help him solve that problem (to the best of her ability).
Each of those motivations makes for very different dialog, and I find that oftentimes, simply framing a conversation in terms of "what does each of these characters want?" will make the process of writing the scene much more straightforward. The conversation doesn't happen because the plot demands it; the conversation happens because one of the characters wants something, which is why they started the conversation in the first place. Sometimes, that reason is simply "I'm bored and want to pass the time while waiting for the bus," or "That person looks unusual, and I'm curious about some aspect of them," or "I'm dealing with some tough stuff at the moment, and I think that maybe articulating all of my inner anxieties to someone else might help me sort through them better." Know their motivations, and you know how they'll talk. Do this for each of the characters participating in the conversation, and you have something that flows
This is why having proactive characters is so important. If you ask the question, "What does each of these characters want?" and the answer is, "Well, nothing, really," then there's not going to be much in that is going to advance our plot or our characters' development.
Incidentally, this is why some "info-dumpy" dialog comes across as so unnatural and stilted. For example, here's an example of really bad dialog:
Teenage boy elf: "How is grandpa doing?"
Teenage girl elf: "Grandpa's been in good health. As you know, he's eighty years old, which is pretty young by elf standards, considering that elves can live to be over 200 years old."
We ask ourselves, "Why are these characters saying these things?" There is no reason for one elf to say to another elf, "As you know, elves can live to be over 200 years old." They're both elves; both of them should already know this basic fact of elf biology. So the answer to "why are these characters saying these things?" is basically, "because the audience needed to know these things," which isn't a narrative justification at all.
Likewise, look at a scene you've written. Ask yourself, "Why are the characters saying these things?" And if you can come up with an answer like, "Well, this character is talking like this because he's mad," or "This character is asking this question because he's trying to get more information," then that's well and good. But if you're coming up with answers like, "Well, this is what gets us to the next scene," or "This conversation is needed to advance the plot," and you're not coming up with any character-based reasons for why the characters would be saying these things (or even having a conversation in the first place), then that may be what is leading to your dialog sounding "forced."
SundownKid wrote:The best way I've seen is to read more (good) books, and get an idea for what good dialogue sounds like. Maybe screenplays too. The best way to learn is by looking at it done well, there's no instant way to start writing more natural dialogue.
While there's certainly validity to this, I think it's important to realize that dialog is a caricature of real speech. Most dialog written in novels isn't really that realistic, but that's okay because it feels realistic. However, you do have this phenomenon where you have a "first generation" of writers who write their dialog as an imitation of speech, and then you have subsequent generations of people who learned how people talk from reading science fiction novels, so what you have is an imitation of an imitation of real speech, which can be quite a different thing.
For a similar phenomenon, you can look at visual art. For example, manga tends to adhere to a very specific aesthetic, and if you look at manga from a historical perspective, the later you go, the more "convergent" it seems to become, as you have generations of kids who were raised on Shounen Jump, and they're imitating
that, rather than the world around them. So while early comics and cartoons might have been a caricature of real life, later comics and cartoons are basically a caricature of a caricature. In certain ways, this is good: you could say that the form has become more "refined" over time. However, it can also start to feel "inbred" when you have six comics by six different artists that are artistically very similar; it feels much less creative.
I guess the point I'm trying to get at is that if your guide to "how do people talk" is spending a bunch of time with Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams, you're limiting yourself a lot, and I the best approach is to imitate the
technique and
approach that you learn from books and seed it with the
ideas that come with exposing yourself to real people. I'm a big fan of stealing ideas from reality, and in a lot of cases I base characters and their voices based on people that I've encountered or overheard in real life. Reading novels can teach you about the craft of writing good dialog, but don't rely on books to give you all of your ideas, and don't use dialog in novels as a model for how people actually talk.
andrewngn13 wrote:On a side note, is there an easy way to tell when you have a main character doing too much inflective thinking?
I'm not sure what you mean by this; could you explain? (Maybe give some examples?)