Realistic Dialog

Realistic characters are fiction's centerpiece. Characters should have many different tags including individual manners of speech.

I once heard of an author's claim that he'd written conversations with five different characters, and didn't need to tag any lines because they all spoke so distinctly. If your characters have dialects that would be easy, but if they are from the same city and socio-economic level, transliterating manners of speech still need attributions to help the reader.

Realistic characters must speak differently, just like people do. Some prefer that dialog read as grammatically perfect as narration, and an author just mention details like accent. Others say that's an example of telling, not showing.

Readers enjoy slang and dialect because it's how real people speak. The artistic touch is not overdoing a character’s speech. Dialog must still be readable—just alter a few words to communicate slanguage or dialect. A street person will use the word "ain't." Characters from the rural south echo Momma's colorful sayings, like "No bigger than a bar of soap."

There's more creative license in dialog than anywhere else in literature, so be creative and have fun.