: Re: How can one write good dialogue in a story without sounding wooden? I began an assignment to write a short story for a Creative Writing submission to a publication and although it was accepted,

@LarsenBagley300

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Well-written, compelling dialogue does two different things simultaneously.

1. Good dialogue moves the story forward.

The more words you use to say something, the more characters you use to build an impression of a social set, the more place-names or magic-system rules or historical tidbits you weigh your reader down with, given a certain amount of narrative, the less you're really telling a story and the more you're just offering up lore. The same reason you don't have twenty major characters instead of five, or three, or one, is the same reason you shouldn't have characters saying things don't matter to move the story forward. This is narrative economy. (And other posters have remarked on it.)

2. Good dialogue makes sense in-universe.

This can be easily lost sight of, but it is the underlying reason why, for example, packing exposition into dialogue often sounds kind of absurd. "Why is that character telling the other character something everyone in the story would already know?" You, the author, have to contrive the situation so that, not only do the things said inform the reader and move the story forward, they are also completely plausible as something the particular character would think, and say out loud, at just the time you're portraying.

Dialogue often sounds wooden and out of character because the author pays plenty of attention to narrative economy, and largely ignores in-universe causality. (In fairness, many readers are a little thick about in-universe causality, so writers often get away with it.)

There ISN'T a magic formula. Writing well is hard; it takes practice, and recognizing and working on the aspects you aren't good at. But it's a skill that can be learned.

I also think that Chris Sunami's answer is very good in regards to acquiring a nuts-and-bolts notion of the how of making dialogue sound more natural.

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