@Ike Willis - You could teach this class! "We all watch movies and television, which is chock full of dialogue: good, bad and inane. One might think it helpful to listen to great actors speaking great words. It’s not. In fact, it will probably screw you up". "It’s like trying to paint landscapes based on how other artists paint landscapes. The best you can do is a crude approximation. In order to paint a great landscape, you need to get your butt out in the cornfield and paint what you see. There’s really no alternative". "Fortunately, the world is full of dialogue cornfields. Sitting at Fatburger for lunch, I eavesdropped on two engineers discussing fire door trim allowances, and two women in their 60’s clucking about how small the hamburgers were. Far more important than the content of the conversations was the flow, the back-and-forth". "We tend to think of dialogue as a tennis volley, with the subject being hit back and forth between speakers. But when you really listen, you realize that people talk over each other constantly, and rarely finish a complete thought".
"We all watch movies and television, which is chock full of dialogue: good, bad and inane. One might think it helpful to listen to great actors speaking great words. It’s not. In fact, it will probably screw you up". It certainly will screw you up. I often use quotes from old movies, even TV commercials. Most young snots don't know what I'm talking about when I'm pouring a can of pop into a glass and say "plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is".
Ike, the young uns may not 'get you' but then we don't get them, do we - am I right or am I right ............
This thread is a couple of years old, and it didn't go very far, but I think I missed it at the time. That's a good link that @Joe Riley referred to. Having once aspired to be a writer, I have a couple of books on writing dialogue but the great writers didn't learn how to write dialogue from books, although they may have learned how to learn to write dialogue from books. Writers have been known to hang out in places where people hang out, such as restaurants, bus stations, and airports, where they can sit near enough to someone to listen in on their conversations - not so much to learn what they have to say, but how they say it. We're not in a good position to hear the conversations that we're engaged in because we're too busy with our side of it, and their side of it, and what we're going to say next. That can be learned by listening to other people who are engaged in conversations.
"Noose-paper" cartoonists bring their scribbles to life, by filling up their 'balloons' with natural dialog...that begs a smile!