The thing about dialogue is, it needs to sound real. It must replicate how real people talk. This is what we have been told. But what if that is just not true? George Saunders told Writer’s Digest about an experiment he did once. He hid a tape recorder under the family’s kitchen and listened later to a conversation between his mother and grandmother:
You couldn’t make a bit a sense of it. It was all sentence fragments and, “Did you get the thing under the …” “Yeah, no, no, I won’t.” “Yeah, you can, sure.” “Later, but he’s gonna …” “Yeah, he is.”
In a story, you transcribe that directly, it makes no sense. I think one of the keys, paradoxically, to good dialogue is for the writer to say to herself, “This is poetry, this is not real speech.” It’s poetry that’s going to make you think it sounds like real speech. It’s going to simulate the rhythms of actual speech…
Chris Barsanti 
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