Giving Dialogue Life

I love to listen when people talk. Not just what they say, mind you, but how they say it. Dialogue is a very fun, tricky part of writing that has endless opportunities. It can convey information to the reader, it shows how the characters interact between one another, it reveals who characters are, and so much more. I love dialogue for so many reasons and, I hope, after reading this blog you will to.
There is a fine balance between writing realistic dialogue and writing what the common man really says. Listen to the conversations during your day. You will find that a majority, or the entirety, of conversations are useless and not entertaining (i.e. uninviting to read) for everyone else. Also, people in real life speak with a lot of slang, sounds, words that are not technically words, and it is a rarity to find someone who speaks in complete sentences. People usually talk like this:

"Hay, Bill."
"What's up?"
"How's Milly?"
"Ah . . . fine."
"Cool, cool."
"Yeah."
"She, uh . . . say anything the other day?"
"Dunno."
"Humm. K."
"Yeah, well. . . . See yeah!"
"By."

Boring! Horribly boring and and not worth wasting you and the reader's time! Good dialogue is the fine line between formal writing and how people really talk. Formal, tight-wad dialogue would be:
"I am not sure we should do this."
Yes, people say that sentence all the time, but not like that. That phrase is cold. Heartless. It's dead. To give it life there should be a little slang. A few filler words. An occasional grammatical error, but it always moved the story forward and has a purpose behind it. So, let's give the above dialogue some life:
"I'm not sure bout this."
It sounds more like a human instead of a robot, doesn't it?
Now there is a flip side to this. As I said, to give dialogue life one must add in slang, grammar errors, and such, BUT not to much! (Have you ever read Charles Dickens' dialogue? I don't know how he got away with that! Don't write like him!) The number one rule of writing is never make the reader work (except to figure out who-done-it or what will happen next). If the reader comes across a phrase that isn't written clearly, the reader won't want to read anymore. Why would they? People read to relax, not struggle threw poorly written sentences. Don't clutter the dialogue with too many realistic ways of speech. It will become hard to read, too hard in fact. No one will want to read it and that defeats the purpose of writing.
If you find it hard to discover that fine line between formal and realistic, read your dialogue out loud. Is the conversation taking to long to get to the point? Does it sound real, yet easy to read? At the end of the conversation, did everything make sense? If you still aren't sure, have someone else read it. A second pare of eyes is always necessary.
Have fun with this. Experiment. Try a new ways to write your character's words and find whats right for you.
There's a lot more to dialogue, but I'll get to that later.

Exercise:
Go to your favorite store with a notepad, a pen, and ear buds. Walk around, without any music on, and listen to people's conversations. No, you're not eavesdropping! It's called research. You'll be surprised what you'll find. Please comment on the odd things you hear people say!   :)