It's partly because I just wrapped my developmental edit of the second novel in S. M. Dunning's Perilous Times Saga. Stephen's characters are, like the author, keen conversationalists—one of the things that makes his fiction so delightful.
That said, I've long been fascinated by the way words tumble out of our mouths. Verbal typos. Misused words. Non sequiturs. Sentences that never properly—
Here's the cold hard truth: written dialogue should never feel like a word-for-word transcription.
If you're not sure about that statement, think about the last phone conversation you had. Would you care to read a transcription of that?
In the past, maybe you were a shitty student or your family was a nightmare or you attempted suicide ... or you went broke or you got sick or you were a workaholic that ignored your family, friends, and coworkers -
When writing your story in this online biography context, you don’t offer apologies or excuses for what did or didn’t happen, neither do you for your circumstances, your mindsets, or your decisions.
You capitalize on it.
But in order to do that, you have to be okay with it...you gotta let it be. This is why our attitude is so important. This is why TONE is important. So what is tone exactly in the context of writing?
Tone is the narrator’s attitude about whatever it is they’re writing about.
Read that last sentence again.
This insight doesn't doesn't just apply to businesspeople. It's precisely what every writer needs to consider as they write dialogue, whether they're writing a light beach read or a devastating memoir. The only difference is that writers need to consider their character's attitude.
When a story's characters all sound the same, this is often the root cause. (And no, it doesn't matter whether the story is fiction or nonfiction.)
Perhaps the author is importing their attitude into the people they're writing about, instead of considering how each character's attitude is different. In this case they need to pause their writing and do some character sketches to get clear on the personality of their characters.
In other instances, the author may be forgetting to consider how often our choice of words communicates our attitude. You don't need an adverb (e.g. "angrily" or "sadly") to tell us how someone feels as they speak. More often than not, we pick up those emotional cues as much from their words as from their tone of voice or physical expressions.
Once you start paying attention to this idea of tone, editing becomes much easier too. It helps you sharpen the words you use, both inside and outside of quotation marks. I dare say it'll even help you sharpen your narration.
Keep your stick on the ice. (Yes, even you, Dave.)