I occasionally write short stories, but mostly I write scripts for TV shows. Many of these shows fit neatly under the Science Fiction and Fantasy umbrellae, and many others do not. But, lucky for me, good dialogue doesn’t change depending on genre. To paraphrase and turn around what James Kirk famously observed, he works in outer space, but he’s from Iowa. I mean, honestly, Captain Kirk is just a guy who moved for work.

So, setting aside non-human characters for now, Sci-Fi is still just writing people. But because innovative settings may make some readers feel distanced from these characters, who live so differently from them, I’d suggest it’s even more important for Sci-Fi prose writers to learn the scriptwriters’ bag of tips and tricks for writing dialogue that feels like it comes out of real speakers.

Here I should point out that there are, of course, large variations in how people speak and communicate. Capturing those different “voices” is a big part of the job, as is respect for those with no voices at all. Nonetheless, an unavoidable task that should be done first is capturing commonalities—ways of speaking that many of us, and many of your characters, share. These rules, of course, are descriptive, not prescriptive—we’re talking about observable traits that a majority of speakers display, not putting any value on all the wonderful and various means of communication.

People listen to themselves. And they’ve consumed media. Another way to put this might be that we’re all kinda self-conscious. We screen our utterances through the ears of our listener—this is why it bothers me when characters throw out names and references that they know their interlocutor doesn’t know—forcing the other character to ask, say, “Who’s Tony?” It’s meant to make the exposition feel natural, but it does the opposite. It leaves me yelling, “You know he doesn’t know Tony!”

Also, people are generally aware when they’re about to utter something that sounds stilted or overused. It doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes do it, but they’ll probably put it in audible quote marks or roll their eyes at themselves. If your character, giving a tour of their home, says, “This is where the magic happens,” and doesn’t put it in audible quotes…well. Most likely, your character shouldn’t say this at all; much better to have them innovate some clever new utterance. Start reading/watching with this in mind and think about whether you’d really say a lot of what characters say. I’m thinking of things like, “I wish we could’ve met under better circumstances,” “to what do I owe the honor?” or even “what’s that delightful fragrance?” or, to get more modern, the many variations on the unprompted aside to the reader, “I didn’t think he was cute. Shut up.” Even in a period piece, formulaic or familiar lines are indigestible logs, and in something that’s meant to feel as innovative as Sci-Fi, they’re especially wooden.

And what if you’re writing a character who is meant to come across as stilted or wooden? I suggest you find a way to do that without reusing lines you’ve heard a hundred times before. What if an officious character, both stilted and wooden, wants to invite people into his office. Well, because people listen to themselves, he tries to do something original. He smirks, “Welcome to my inner sanctum,” which it isn’t terribly original but also isn’t something I’ve heard a million times—readers probably come away believing that’s something this character has heard somewhere before and is repeating. And, by the way, it provides an excellent set-up for a more original character to call them “sanctumonious” in the following line! If you observe people in real life, rather than writing scenes that you’ve seen before, this kind of writing will start to come naturally.

Conversation is collaborative. In conversation, people often wait only till they understand what the other person is saying and then they tend to jump in. Knowing that, we tend to keep our utterances pretty short and frontload the information to get it out before we’re interrupted. Having characters speak fairly efficiently and sometimes cut each other off or anticipate the other speakers, or infer what they’re about to say, will feel natural and also get information out really quickly. This is something you can do after you write each scene—go back through and figure out when each character knows what’s coming and see if it makes sense to have them jump the gun, just a little. Especially if characters are trying to communicate quickly, you’re unlikely to have a character say something like “Look, over there, past the bridge, I see some light. Try steering for that.” As soon as they say, “Look—” they’re likely to be cut off, either by some version of “I see it,” some version of “where?” or, best of all, by some version of being thrown off their feet as the vehicle swerves toward the light. The same thing is true of characters under emotional pressure instead of time pressure. A line that starts “This is just like that time you—” is unlikely to get much farther without being interrupted. You can try this one at home!

People speak less fluently—not more—when they’re emotional. In real life, we hesitate, fumble, and backtrack, especially when we’re emotional. Giving your character a little verbal stumble will tell the reader they’re emotionally affected by what’s going on, without you needing to do anything more than that, and will make their dialogue feel real, not “written” or glib. This is true, by the way, for any emotion, positive or negative—our tongues trip over joy as well as anger. Authors differ on the extent to which they want to accurately reflect spoken speech—real speech is intolerable in its inefficiencies—but a flavor of it, especially at emotional moments, is a very good thing. This doesn’t have to be a straight-up stammer; since you’re looking to innovate anyway, find creative ways to show that a character’s communication has been affected by their emotion. When you have your character misuse a word, smack themselves in the face out of frustration, literally bite their tongue, or repeat the word “eurgh” a few times, you are conveying their emotional state far more effectively than having them launch into a polished monologue. By the way, Jane Austen knew this. When (spoiler) Lizzie finally accepts Darcy’s proposal, Austen writes that she “immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances.” Austen, of course, is having fun here by having it both ways. She expresses the sentiment in pointedly elaborate prose, while at the same time making clear that Lizzie didn’t actually say anything like that, instead speaking “not very fluently,” due to her emotional state.

People are funny. This is the biggest of all. Do you go through many conversations in which you don’t laugh? People laugh, even when they’re scared or in danger. In Philip K. Dick’s short story, “Colony,” a character is attacked when inanimate objects start coming to life. He says, “That’s my rug. I brought it from Terra. My wife gave it to me. I—I trusted it completely.” (Notice, by the way, the hesitation in his speech to convey emotion per our previous rule.) A man saying he feels betrayed by his bathroom rug is objectively hilarious. And, what’s more, it’s my belief that the character knows it’s hilarious, or at the very least, absurd—see our first rule, “People listen to themselves.” This is one of my favorite lines of dialogue in all of Science Fiction. It sings with humanity.

Some people may tell you that humor deflects the tension in a moment. And it certainly can. But what if the characters in a scene are purposefully using humor to deflect tension, as humans do? If two characters in danger are trying to find a way to laugh, their tension may be punctured, but the tension of the reader is not—the reader is all the more tense because they’re suddenly aware just how scared the characters are: scared enough to try to laugh. In fact, people use humor to do all kinds of things, not just to alleviate fear. We use it to persuade each other, to show off our wit and intelligence, to self-deprecate, to hide or soften truths, to demonstrate false nonchalance…pretty much anything I can think of someone wanting to do, people can—and do—use humor for. A world without humor in it isn’t going to make your story feel gritty—it will make it feel unreal.

And one more observation about humor. It’s been my experience that more peripheral characters tend to be the joke: Their behavior makes us laugh. While more central, more developed characters tend to make the joke. They employ wit to look at life with a recognition of its absurdity. I find this is worth keeping in mind as I write. Want to make readers suddenly take a peripheral character more seriously? Give them some good deadpan wit out of nowhere. Look at the pilot of any spin-off show in which a peripheral character is moved from supporting role to being the lead…suddenly they’re the soul of wit. Remember the Friends spin-off Joey? No? Well, he suddenly knew how to make smart observational jokes.

Now let’s look at a couple things that might affect Science Fiction dialogue writing in particular:

Dialect. What if your characters’ dialogue is affected by them being from a different culture—say, an alien culture or a far-future culture, or perhaps a recognizable Earth culture that has simply persisted and evolved? You may want to give them some quirks of speech that come from living in their unique time and place with their unique background. The characters on Firefly had a sort of nineteenth-century cowboy vocabulary and syntax. For example, I gave Mal the line, “Seems to me, last time there was a chance for a little palaver, we were all manner of unwelcome.” It’s obviously not natural contemporary speech, but it is natural for the character/time/place. Similarly, the vocabulary of the vault-dwellers in Fallout is affected by their isolation and the culture of the time period in which they entered the vaults. Writing recognizable humans doesn’t mean they have to sound just like your neighbor down the hall. What’s more important is that the speech of the characters—whatever it is—is affected by human emotions and human limitations.

Non-humans. And finally, what about those wonderful special characters of Science Fiction and Fantasy? What about the aliens and androids? And the demons and gods and vampires and Frankensteins, the literal non-humans who populate Sci-Fi. They, of course, give us a chance to break a few of the guidelines above on purpose. Vulcans, vampires, and androids all tend to speak without the emotional stammers of most humans, and without employing much humor. And I don’t feel like they’re big interrupters, either. Some demons, some aliens, less advanced robots, and general Frankensteins may slip out of even more of the constraints of human speech by not speaking at all, or by speaking in a way that’s difficult for other characters to understand. If you give a character a voice that differs from the way I’ve characterized speech above, you may want to find other ways to give them expression. Perhaps you design a moment where the character suddenly projects their emotion in a different way—giving a Spock-like character an unexpected dry joke or relieved smile, for example. Or, even more difficult, by writing a story that gives viewers the tools to understand the alien’s communication in their own terms —examples might be ET’s heart light, the wonderful language circles in Arrival, and the allegorical speech of Star Trek’s “Darmok” episode—all means of conveying information that the viewers are helped to understand, giving them “a way into” the characters.

Now, perhaps you are using these kinds of characters to stand in for, let’s say, neurodivergent people in the way that say, Murderbot is often seen as doing. After all, you probably are writing your story with the intent that readers can apply it to the real world. Of course, in this case, you want to make sure that what you’re conveying is sensitive, helpful, and true. Be sure you know what point you are trying to make before you have any non-human stand in for a human.

 

What Not to Learn from Scriptwriters:

When writing a script, there’s a temptation to do everything with dialogue. But there are other ways to communicate. Not enough screenwriters have a character shake off an offer with a turn of their head, or wave away a question with their hand, or register distaste with an eyebrow. Even though we have marvelous actors standing by, with their talented faces capable of so much expression, there can be an aversion to using description instead of dialogue in a script. “No one reads it,” we are told. But that’s a matter of the particular formatting of scripts—in prose, you should feel very free to give your characters a full range of expression beyond speech.

 

Making it Sci-Fi:

Of course, Science Fiction examines the world, and points out patterns in it that we might not be consciously aware of. The whole notion of this essay, the idea that the manner of communication reveals and reflects humanity, is exactly the kind of thing that Sci-Fi is designed to explore and challenge. So, once you’ve mastered how humans speak, there’s mileage to be had in proving everything I said incorrect. After all, we began with the disclaimer that every voice is different, and the “rules” are just abstracted generalizations. Show that characters who break the naturalism rules are intensely “human” nonetheless—Hey there, Spock. Or flip it around: The Cylons of Battlestar Galactica who had integrated into the human community speak exactly like the humans, including using humor, which ultimately makes things harder for the humans to decide what rights they should have. Caprica Six on Battlestar, and Demerzel on Foundation, are among the characters I have loved writing most; their artificial natures have been used to victimize them, and their stories are heartbreakingly human. Even the extremely and delightfully alien alien in Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary has traits we recognize and identify with, and Weir has great fun playing with notions of how to determine intention and humor in ways that have little to do with the usual processing of human speech.

And of course, prose writers have something we scriptwriters are very envious of: You can write internal dialogue. Other than in voiceover, which is typically/cyclically out of fashion, we scriptwriters have to do tricks with dialogue to get you into a character’s head, while prose writers can just (gasp) write it out. And of course, you can decide if a character’s inner voice is the same as their spoken voice, or different. Do you want to mimic typical spoken speech in one or both of these modes? Probably good to know the tricks of doing so, either way.

Finally, remember that we scripters are proficient with the tool that is dialogue-writing because it’s almost our only one. We have a hammer in a world that is not made of nails, so we’ve learned how to use that hammer in different ways. You might say we know what a peen is for. If you want a hammer like that, it’ll serve you well to master the skills of the screenwriter: learn how to make dialogue feel real.

And then, of course, feel free to totally change the definition of what “real” is.

© 2026 Jane Espenson