You asked how to make them sound real

Somebody sixteen years old wrote to me this week to say that all her characters sound the same. They are, she said, polite to each other in a way nobody actually is. She wanted to know how you make people on a page sound like people. It is a better question than most adults ask me, so here is a real answer.

First: they are polite because you are being kind to them, and you have to stop. Real people interrupt. They answer the question underneath the question instead of the one you asked. They say fine when it is the least fine thing in the world, and they change the subject the exact second it gets near the thing that matters. Your characters are being well behaved because you love them and you do not want to put them through anything. Love them a little less on the page. It is the only place it is safe to.

Second, and this is the actual trick: stop giving everyone the same size of sentence. Listen to your friends for one day, really listen, and you will notice that one of them talks in long unspooling paragraphs that never quite land, and one of them says three words and then nothing, and one of them asks a question at the end of every single statement, don't they? People have a shape. You already know the shape of everyone you love. You just have not been writing it down.

People have a shape. You already know the shape of everyone you love.

Here is a thing to try. Take two of your characters and take away everything they are allowed to say except what they would actually say, and then cut that in half again. See what is left. Usually what is left is truer than the whole speech, because the whole speech was you explaining, and nobody in real life gets to explain. They just get one line and a closing door.

And then, once you have made them all sound different, you do the cruel and wonderful thing that makes a reader put the book down and stare at the wall. You give two people who love each other completely different sizes of sentence at the worst possible moment. One of them is spilling everything, too fast, all of it, and the other one can only manage a single word. Put those two ways of talking in the same small room and do not explain either of them, and you will have written the thing you actually wanted to write, which was never the dialogue.

It was the gap between the two of them, and how nobody in the room knows how to cross it.

You are sixteen and you noticed your own characters were being too polite. Trust me on this. You are going to be fine.