Most new plays don't fail at the plot. They fail in the space between two characters who are supposed to be talking to each other and instead sound like they are waiting their turn to explain the story. Dialogue is the part of playwriting that feels most natural to write and is the hardest to revise, because every line seems necessary until you hear it out loud in a room with actors. What follows are five mistakes that show up again and again in scripts from newer writers, each with a fix you can apply to pages you have already written.

Mistake One: Every Character Speaks in the Same Voice

Cover the character names on any page of your draft. Can you tell who is speaking? If not, you have written one character with several bodies. New playwrights tend to write in their own rhythm: the same sentence length, the same vocabulary, the same dry wit, handed around like a coat. It reads smoothly and it sounds like nobody.

Voice is not an accent or a catchphrase. It is a relationship to language. One character over-explains because silence frightens her. One answers in fragments because he has learned that anything longer gets used against him. One asks questions instead of answering them. One speaks in the vocabulary of her job because work is the only place she feels competent. Those differences do more characterisation than a page of backstory.

A quick test: write the same simple request — leave the room — in the mouth of each character in the scene. If all four versions come out roughly the same length and shape, you have found the problem. Then check how articulate everyone is. In early drafts, every character tends to be equally clever and equally fluent. Give at least one of them a subject they cannot talk about clearly. That stumble is often the most interesting thing on the page.

Mistake Two: Dialogue That Exists to Inform the Audience

You know the line. "Ever since Mother died and left you the house on Chestnut Street, you've been different." Two people who lived through all of it, telling each other what they already know, because the audience needs the information. It is the most common form of exposition and the easiest to hear in someone else's script, much harder in your own.

The question to ask of every line is not "does the audience need this?" but "what does this character gain by saying this, to this person, right now?" If the answer is nothing, the line is doing your job instead of theirs.

Two workarounds that hold up in rehearsal

First, put someone in the room who genuinely does not know. A new partner, a carer, an auditor, a neighbour who has just moved in. Information given to a stranger has a reason to exist, and the stranger's reaction gives it a temperature. Second, let the information arrive as a weapon, a slip, or a lie. A character who reveals the family debt in the middle of an argument is not explaining; she is trying to win.

And when in doubt, cut the fact and see whether the scene still works. Audiences are far better at assembling a story from fragments than writers give them credit for.

Mistake Three: Saying Exactly What They Mean

New dialogue often sounds like a therapy session with good lighting. Characters name their feelings precisely and in order: "I'm angry that you lied to me, and I need you to acknowledge it." Real people rarely do this. They make tea, change the subject, attack something adjacent, or answer a question they were not asked.

On the nose: "I'm hurt that you didn't come to the opening."
With subtext: "Did the cast stay long afterwards?"

The second line carries the wound without announcing it, and it gives the actor somewhere to go. Watch what happens when a character wants something and refuses to ask for it directly: the scene tightens, because the other person has to work out what is really being said.

One more symptom to watch for — the press-conference scene. If characters ask each other questions and receive full, direct, honest answers, you are writing an interview, not a conversation. People dodge. They half-answer, then circle back three lines later when they have found their nerve. Let them.

Mistake Four: Too Many Words, and All of Them Polite

First drafts are courteous. Characters greet each other, say please, confirm arrangements, use each other's names in every line, and finish their sentences. Then the scene starts. Cut the corridor and begin in the room.

Try this cutting pass on a scene you are stuck with:

1. Delete the first three lines and read from there. Most scenes start two beats too early.
2. Remove every greeting, sign-off and piece of small talk that only establishes that people know each other.
3. Cut character names unless someone is being corrected or a third person is being addressed.
4. Remove any line that repeats information the previous line already delivered.
5. Read it aloud, and mark with a pencil the exact point where your attention drifts. That is where the scene actually begins, or ends.

Leave the interruptions in. A line broken by another character does more than a stage direction explaining that the room is tense.

Mistake Five: Nobody Wants Anything

The most common invisible problem is a scene where two people exchange opinions and nothing shifts. They discuss a dead relative, the state of the neighbourhood, the difficulty of the job. It may be beautifully written and it is not yet drama, because no one in the room is trying to get something from anyone else.

Before you revise a scene, write one sentence at the top of the page for each character: wants ___ from ___ before the scene ends. If the answer is "to be understood", dig further — understood by whom, and what would it cost them to ask? Then place an obstacle in the way, ideally another character with a competing want.

Finally, ask what changes. An alliance, an appetite, a piece of knowledge, a balance of power: something has to be different at the end of the scene than at the start. If nothing has moved, you have a conversation, not a scene — and the fix is usually a small one, like letting the character who has been holding back finally say the wrong thing.

A Practical Revision Pass

Take one scene, not the whole play. Read it aloud standing up, with a friend reading the other part and no acting required. Listen for the two places where you get bored, and cut or rewrite only those. Then do the cover-the-names test, the wants sentence, and the first-three-lines cut on that single scene. Fixing one scene properly teaches you more than a full sweep of notes across ninety pages. Repeat next week with the next scene.

Photo: Ron Lach / Pexels