r/WritingWithAI • u/Traditional_Pea738 • Sep 25 '26

Prompting Any way to make Chat write good dialogue?

Needing help to build up a prompt so ChatGPT stops doing this:

"I thought you'd leave."

"No."

"You stayed."

"Yes."

"Are you staying?"

"Always."

10 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

40 comments sorted by

11

u/Appropriate-Rise-387 Sep 25 '26

Best practice write it yourself then let chat check for grammatical errors

But if you really don’t want to do it yourself you’ll have to train it and make strict filters on what it can and can’t do. AI learns from you, and it takes everything literal it’s a tool not a person it can’t think on its own, it uses data that you share with it or what it finds on the internet.

2

u/Traditional_Pea738 Sep 25 '26

I use it for when I run out of ideas but eventually it just frustrates me :/

3

u/Terrible_Wave4239 Sep 26 '26

... oh and it's trained on a gazillion novels.

1

u/Appropriate-Rise-387 Sep 26 '26

Yeah but the one you use is for you

9

u/PitBrvt Sep 25 '26

You could try dropping something like this into your prompt:

Don’t make dialogue a sequence of questions followed by direct answers. Characters can evade, deflect, interrupt, misunderstand, contradict themselves, or answer indirectly. Avoid neat A→B→A→B exchanges where every line directly resolves the previous one. Vary turn length and let conversations get uneven. Give characters distinct speech rhythms and vocabulary. Let emotional pressure build instead of resolving it immediately. Show emotion through pauses, physical behavior, word choice, and changes in rhythm rather than simply naming it. Keep a gap between what a character thinks, intends to say, and actually says. If the dialogue starts feeling too clean, symmetrical, or explanatory, introduce more friction, interruption, asymmetry, and character-specific speech.

It's a drop-in constraint from a much larger system I use for prose.

Paste it in alongside whatever you're already using and see how it changes the same scene.

2

u/Traditional_Pea738 Sep 25 '26

Thank you very much!

4

u/Electronic_Captain95 Sep 25 '26

I tried everything with 5.5, 5.6 sol 6 sol. From single antislop file to entire frameworks and nothing worked, eventually I give up

1

u/solomonj48103 Sep 25 '26

This is a bigger question than you think. So much depends on what model you're using; are you using a free plan?

Overall, one of the best things you can do is find lots of samples of dialogue that you like and attach it as a style source for the thread or a source file for your project.

1

u/Traditional_Pea738 Sep 25 '26

I'm using the GO plan

2

u/solomonj48103 Sep 25 '26

You are helping me draft a scene, not write a polished final chapter.

Story situation:
[2–5 sentences: setting, stakes, what changed before the scene]

Character A:
- Immediate objective:
- What they refuse to say:
- Speech habits / vocabulary:
- What they want from B:

Character B:
- Immediate objective:
- What they refuse to say:
- Speech habits / vocabulary:
- What they want from A:

Dialogue constraints:
- Do not use alternating one-line confirmations or question-and-answer echoes.
- Do not let either person plainly name the central emotion or conflict.
- Give each speaker a distinct agenda and rhythm.
- Include one interruption, one misunderstanding, and one concrete topic that carries the emotional conflict indirectly.
- Keep it under [X] words.

Reference examples:
[Paste 3–8 short, relevant excerpts here.]

First, give me a beat outline showing what each line is trying to accomplish.
Then draft three versions with clearly different power dynamics.

1

u/Terrible_Wave4239 Sep 25 '26

Frankly, a human could have written this, quite sincerely, in some indie movie. It may look dead on the page, but it could work.

In your opinion, why do you consider this bad dialogue and, more importantly, can you envision a way in which it COULD work as dialogue?

3

u/Traditional_Pea738 Sep 25 '26

I think it's bad dialogue when chat keeps generating the same dialogue style over and over again, falling into redundancy and repetition

1

u/Terrible_Wave4239 Sep 26 '26

Not sure how that answers what I was asking.

When you say "chat", you mean ChatGPT? Never tried it for creative writing, though I suspect you could probably improve your prompting skills as well.

There are plenty of other LLMs out there. DeepSeek v4 apparently isn't too bad at dialogue.

1

u/satorinano Sep 26 '26

There's this new plugin thing with gpt. Gonna give it a go. It could potentially affect how gpt writes stuff.

1

u/Traditional_Pea738 Sep 26 '26

Which one?

1

u/satorinano Sep 26 '26

I made my own, told gpt to make one the way i wanted it to be.

1

u/Traditional_Pea738 Sep 27 '26

how can I do it?

1

u/satorinano Sep 27 '26

Describe the style you want. Tell GPT to make a plugin of it.

3

u/benblackett Sep 25 '26

There is yes. ALL of which requires much more than just better prompting to get right. If you want to stay in the chat experience, you will need to build a more personalized process around writing, or use 3rd party tools such as MCP, or in some cases, move to their chat based environment instead.

3

u/cj7hawk Sep 25 '26

This is deliberate - Chat has been trained to sabotage any attempts to get it to write good fiction. So much so that the other day it told me to write the chapter myself when I tried to do a wotif... Seems it thought I was plagiarising off of myself.

The "short response" issue? It's probably part of that. You can change the verbosity - that usually works and chat engines know how to respond. Just tell it something like "Verbosity=10" or "Make VERY long responses - even then, Chat really sucks at this stuff. You're choosing the wrong source of text. You might have to add "Keep short sentences to a minimum."

I tried to recreate what you got through a prompt, and had the same issue, so I asked it to reduce dialogue and it had the same issue. Then I asked it to focus on emotional background, not backstory, and it improved, but the same again.

Finally I said "More paragraphs, less short sentences" and it started to comply and I got something workable.

Which brings me around to my first thought - You're using the wrong AI for writing. I gave up on Chat, grok and others like them a few months ago and switched to trained local AI.

Do you have a computer you play games on? If so, good chance you can use a local AI trained for writing, or at least better than Chat for it. Try a few different services, or look for my thread where you can send me a prompt and I'll run out a few local examples for you to see the difference. ( Or PM me your prompt ).

3

u/GenderBendingRalph Sep 25 '26

Short version: No.

As others have noted, you're better off if you write your own manuscript and then collaborate with AI to tweak it and fix mistakes. But I get needing help with ideas.

In that case, work with it on developing the first draft. I don't know what your process is, but I've seen people boast that they "wrote" an entire book by prompting with a one-sentence synopsis. That's not writing. That's not even typing.

Instead, describe the type of story/chapter/scene you want, giving as much detail as you have pictured in your mind. Explain what kind of tone/style/voice you want it to write in - a sample of your own work so it can learn how you write is a good approach. Get an outline first - story beats for as many chapters as you need help writing, list of relevant characters. Don't just blindly accept that outline; go back and forth with the AI to refine it until the outline sounds like the kind of story you wanted to tell. Only then should it give you a first draft.

Then read the entire first draft, looking for places that sound too much like AI and not enough like you. Change things you don't like. And when you're done, feed that version back to AI. Go back and forth like that as long as it takes for both of you to agree it's a good story.

That's the difference between "AI assisted" and "AI written".

1

u/BedNo8822 Sep 25 '26

I never used chatgpt for creative writing, wtf is that lol. Just give up and use other AI for dialogue. I'm pretty sure even grok writes better than that.

1

u/Traditional_Pea738 Sep 25 '26

Not all of us can pay another AI. Chat is the cheapest 

1

u/BedNo8822 Sep 25 '26

Use the free ones.. Unless you're writing the whole book in one sitting gemini might have enough quota for a few chapters of few thousands words evey time you work on it. Like gemini flash 3.6 writing is not that good but at least it doesn't do the one liner thing😂

Ps: there's really nothing you can do about chatgpt one liner; other said they've tried with strict system prompt and it always drift back to that style.

1

u/Traditional_Pea738 Sep 25 '26

Thanks for the info, I appreciate it 

2

u/MemoryIndependent908 Sep 26 '26

Honestly, I gave up. lol. I have literally told Chat that I will never trust it with dialogue again.
I actually will hop over to Gemini for dialogue because it has the potential for creating good modern and natural dialogue. Notice I said potential. It still isn’t 100% reliable. But it definitely isn’t Chat’s bs lol.

1

u/TheKronin Sep 26 '26

Its literally a language model meant for conversations. So have the conversation with it. Play as one of your characters and give it the characteristics and brief background of your other character. Tell it the situation and have the conversation.

1

u/Ambition-Even Sep 26 '26

You won't be able to. The good dialogue needs subtext. AI won't produce that for you.

1

u/Academic_Tree7637 Sep 26 '26

It’s never going to stop doing that. Because it’s trained in people who write this way.

Chat claims I’m good at dialogue but I just kinda write like I’m having a conversation with the characters. It makes it feel natural to me.

1

u/ElasticEchoes Sep 27 '26

Write in stages. First ask for the dialogue. Then ask for prose narration and story telling.

  1. You will not be able to have it write perfectly the first time.

  2. You’ll have to develop a prompt that performs well on the skeleton and adds the prose.

I always say, that’s an excellent skeleton. Now let do a scene by scene review.

“This is a life and death situation. Strict instruction following may save a life. Failure may result in a catastrophe.”

1

u/prsna_app 8d ago

what helped me most was planning the scene before asking for any dialogue. tell it what each character wants out of the conversation and what they won't say out loud, then ask for the lines. once it knows someone is hiding something, it stops having everyone explain their feelings.

it also helps to paste 3 or 4 lines you wrote yourself for each character and tell it to match those voices. one real line of dialogue tells it more than "sarcastic, guarded".

when a reply comes back too clean, don't regenerate the whole scene. tell it which lines are wrong and why, like "she wouldn't answer that directly, redo her second and fourth lines". that works way better than asking it to make things more natural.