7 Dialogue Mistakes in Short Stories (and How to Fix Them)
Dialogue is the part of a short story that readers hear. Get it right and the page turns itself. Get it wrong and attention slips away mid-sentence. In a short story there is nowhere to hide: with a few thousand words to play with, every exchange has to earn its place. The seven mistakes below turn up again and again in workshop manuscripts and competition entries, and each one comes with a fix you can apply in a single revision pass.
1. Characters Explain Things They Both Already Know
“I still can’t believe Dad left us the bakery, which has been in the family since 1953 and has a lease that runs out in March,” Ruth said.
Ruth’s brother already knows about the lease. The only person who needs the date is the reader, and the reader can be told in half a line of narration. When two characters swap facts they both possess, the scene stops being a scene and becomes a briefing.
Ask three questions of every speech: would this person say this, to this person, at this moment? If not, cut it. Move the facts into narration, or better, let them surface through conflict. Ruth only needs to say “March”, and her brother’s face can do the rest.
2. Everyone Sounds the Same
Cover the speech tags on a page of your dialogue and read it back. If you cannot tell who is speaking, your characters are sharing one voice — yours.
Give each of them three things:
- Rhythm. One speaks in clipped half-sentences; another circles a point three times before reaching it.
- Diction. The words only they would use. A nurse, a teenager and a retired teacher reach for different vocabulary, and none of them says “utilise”.
- Preoccupation. What they steer the conversation back to when the topic drifts: guilt, money, the past, being right.
A quick blind test
Read a page aloud with the tags removed. If two characters could swap lines without anyone noticing, rewrite one of them from scratch — shorter sentences, a habit of interrupting, a refusal to answer directly. Small differences carry further than you would think.
3. Every Question Gets a Straight Answer
Real conversation is full of dodges, half-answers and replies to questions nobody asked. Fiction that ignores this reads like a transcript:
“Where were you last night?” “I was at the pub.” “Who with?” “Tom.” “Why didn’t you call?” “Because I forgot.”
Nobody is dodging, so there is no tension, and we learn nothing about either person.
The fix: make one character answer the question they wanted to be asked, not the one they were asked. Let a reply arrive two beats late. Let someone change the subject by talking about the weather, and let the other person notice. When characters resist each other, dialogue starts doing work that description cannot.
4. Adverbs, Exclamations and Fancy Tags
“He said angrily.” “She opined.” “He retorted, exasperated.” These are panic buttons, pressed when the line itself is not carrying the tone. If the words do not sound angry, “angrily” will not save them.
Keep said and asked almost everywhere. They are invisible, and invisible is what you want. Where you would reach for an adverb, try an action beat instead:
“Fine.” He put the mug down harder than he meant to.
One beat, and the temper is on the page. Use exclamation marks sparingly too — a page of them flattens rather than lifts.
5. Talking Heads in an Empty Room
Dialogue that floats free of a body or a place feels staged. Readers need something physical to anchor the voices: a kitchen table, a car park, a hospital corridor, hands doing something.
Break a long exchange with a small action every few lines. Someone wipes a window that is not dirty. Someone folds a receipt into quarters. The action does not need to mean anything, but it will, because readers read behaviour as character.
Watch for tics, though. If your characters are forever nodding, sighing and shrugging, you have swapped one habit for another. Choose actions that belong to this scene and this person, and use them once.
6. Small Talk and Throat-Clearing
Greetings, pleasantries and goodbyes eat words fast. “Hi.” “Hi, how are you?” “Fine, you?” “Not bad.” Nothing has happened, and the story has moved backwards.
Start late and leave early. Cut the first two lines of every exchange and the last two, then read it again; most of the time the scene is sharper for it. If a greeting must stay, make it do a job — a name mispronounced, a hand not taken, a hesitation that tells us the relationship has changed since last time.
7. Punctuation That Trips the Reader
Small errors pull readers out of a story faster than a weak line, because they break the sound in the head. The essentials:
- New speaker, new paragraph. Always.
- A speech tag attaches with a comma inside the quotation marks: “I’ll go,” she said.
- A question mark or exclamation mark replaces the comma: “Are you coming?” he asked.
- If the speech continues after the tag, use a comma after it and do not capitalise: “I’ll go,” she said, “if you wait.”
- An em dash for interruption, an ellipsis for trailing off. Do not use both in the same line.
Keep one style throughout. Mixed conventions look careless, even when the dialogue itself is strong.
One Revision Pass, Ten Minutes
You do not need a rewrite. Work through this list once, in order, and most of the problems above will disappear:
- Read the dialogue aloud, standing up. Your ear catches what your eye forgives.
- Cover the speech tags. Can you still tell who is talking?
- Delete the first two and last two lines of every exchange.
- Replace one adverb or elaborate tag per page with an action beat.
- Check paragraphing, commas and dashes.
Good dialogue does at least two jobs at once: it moves the plot and reveals the person speaking. If a line only does one, it is a candidate for cutting. Read your characters’ voices back to yourself and ask whether they sound like people who have known each other for years. That, more than any rule, is what makes a conversation feel true.
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