Possibly unpopular opinion here, but I cannot stand the use of “realistic” casual dialogue. Ums and uhs and wells and yeahs and… random bouts of trailing off in the middle of sentences.
You don’t want to write realistic dialogue. You want to write dialogue equivalent to your brain’s understanding of realistic dialogue.
The broken, casual phrasing might be natural, word for word. It might even sound natural to the person who’s writing it. But it doesn’t align with the way we comprehend speech. It doesn’t account for the work our subconscious does in order to dissect and analyze speech patterns, to take in a stream of disjointed words and create a concrete meaning.
In real life, we have the privilege of being entirely engulfed in the conversation, of experiencing every visual and vocal cue, and quite often of knowing the particular tendencies of the person we’re speaking with. The reader never has this. They are constantly limited to only what is stated on the page, brought to them at exactly the speed they read it.
In real life, we also have the redundancy of being a part of boring, anti-climatic conversations. Real conversations generally go nowhere. They’re fun for the people in them, but useless to everyone else. This isn’t what you want in you writing. You want dialogue that says something, with every sentence, every phrase, every line.
Casual speech and inter-dialogue pacing (aka, the ‘…’ syndrome) has it’s place, but it’s place it not to show normalcy, but to emphasis difference. ‘Um, well… yeah’ is a stagnate, worthless line when used many times in the same story, but when used only a few times, in a book where the rest of the dialogue says what it means, it becomes an obvious sign of embarrassment and hesitation, even fear.
So write the sort of solid, easily comprehended dialogue that allows your readers to subconsciously apply pacing, without visual cues like ‘…’ or the unless addition of yeah and well, or any other removable words or phrases.
Don’t write the exact words said. Write the meaning behind them.
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