I recorded a real conversation and transcribed it, hoping to learn how people actually speak. The transcript is unreadable, full of repetition and half sentences, and nothing like good dialogue in novels.
So realistic is clearly not the target. What is dialogue supposed to be doing instead?
Accepted Answer
Dialogue is not a recording, it is a performance of speech. It should feel like how people talk while being far more compressed than actual talk.
What makes it stilted is usually not the rhythm but the function. Stilted dialogue is characters exchanging information the reader needs, in complete sentences, agreeing with each other.
Real conversation is full of people wanting different things, talking past each other, answering a question with another question, and leaving things unsaid because they assume the other person knows.
Put a mismatch of wants into a scene and the dialogue stops sounding like a briefing, usually without changing the vocabulary at all.
One specific thing to look for in your draft: characters saying things they both already know for the reader's benefit.
"As you know, your brother has been missing since the fire." Nobody says that. Once you start looking you will find it everywhere, and it is the single largest cause of dialogue that reads as fake.
The fix is to let the reader be slightly behind rather than fully briefed. Trust that they can hold an unexplained reference for a page.
Reading it aloud catches most of the rest. Anything you stumble over is usually a sentence nobody would say in one breath.
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