How do you write dialogue that sounds chaotic but actually tracks?

Question

I'm working on a character who talks fast, jumps between ideas, interrupts themselves, and generally sounds like they’re rambling—until, somehow, everything circles back and makes perfect sense in the end. Kind of like someone playing hot potato with their own thoughts while still making an argument.

The character’s personality is part of it (very smart, a bit impulsive, likely neurodivergent), but I’m finding it tricky to strike the balance between quirky and incoherent. Especially since the story itself is grounded, not sci-fi or surreal—so I can't lean on technobabble or absurdity to carry the tone.

One thing I’m realizing is that it’s not just about how they speak—it’s about what they know, when they say it, and how their words interact with what the reader knows at that point. In a way, it becomes a timing and structure issue as much as a dialogue one.

I’ve been looking for ways to track that kind of thing—like a system for mapping which character knows what, when something gets revealed, and how the dialogue reflects that knowledge.

Have any of you written characters like this? How do you manage the balance between erratic speech and actual clarity? And do you have ways to track that kind of internal logic through revisions?

Would love to hear any experiences, tips, or tools that helped you untangle this.

Answer 1

I would recommend making a table on google docs or something with one page for each character, listing important pieces of information and whether they know them or not. If a character thinks one thing that is false, also note that. You could even go a step further by writing in at what point in time they found out, this way you can keep tabs of everything that your characters are thinking about.

Something that might help to show that a character is intelligent is keeping in mind their level of emotion intelligence or lack-there-of. You could show that they're incredibly focused on non-emotional things, so they could overstep a boundary in the heat of the moment by saying something that they weren't supposed to say that they use to prove their point.

Or if they are emotionally intelligent, you could show that by the rhythm of the conversation being broken for a second or two because they refrained from saying something that might have hurt the other person. I'm not the most qualified to answer this question but I hope that helps, and I hope more people respond as well.

Answer 2

One approach to this is to (as an exercise) write out what the character has to say in a rational, ordered fashion, preliminary or supporting points first, then intermediate conclusions based on those, then final conclusions.

Something anybody could understand and possibly agree with.

But that is a working paper -- next, pull things out of that at random, and have your character excitedly talk about it, before switching to another point, going backward, jumping forward, too eager to get to the conclusion.

Altogether, what the character says makes sense, it is just hard to grasp because it is all out of order.

Answer 3

Shorter is faster, longer is slower.

"Eh, what?"

"Oh, darling, don't go poking your head around those old pilliars of eternity."

"Eh?

"I told you. Don't go poking your head around. The last time I came here I saw you standing beside one of those old pillars. You know, one of those old pillars of eternity, but it disappeared by morning. It was in your yard. It looked like one of those old pillars of eternity..."

"Eh? You saw what? I don't hop and skip around. The old pillar never showed up in my yard, you're a liar! I like to keep my ideas poppin' and bouncin' around, yeh know? But not in your pockets. Get my ideas? Frown, frown, frown. They aren't jumpin' or bouncin' around. Mind your own buisness."

"I never said you bop or bounce around, idiot. You're not listening..."

I don't personally make notes about scenes from my novel. I just read the story and get familiar with all the scenes and edit them from time to time to get all the information from flowing over into the sea. In dialog, about all you can do is break it up to make it chop faster, or shorten it. Narration works the same. The shorter a sentence is, the faster it reads. The longer a sentence is, the slower it reads. You can break it down even more, but I don't normally do so. Not my style, personally.

Your dialog should be telling your story, so I wouldn't worry about making it choppy. It needs to be telling your story. Write it like this: What you doin' pokin' around? Stuff like that. Shorten it, but tell your story through your dialog. That's what is important. Other characters might use a longer approach to make the dialog seem more natural.

If the reader wants different styles of voices, then that's their job to dictate. You could write the dialog in passive, break it down, make it choppy, etc, but I don't fool around with all that. It's not personally my style of book.

My style is the hypnotic style of writing. My style is based on trance and hypnosis and holding the magic all throughout the book or the story. My style is based on flow. I want to move people with my words. Put weight to emotion.

Don't worry too much about dialog. Worry about storytelling. If you want to be an artist, you need to be original. A lot of people can write well, so you need to seperate your personally from theirs. You need to be your own character.

Writers are like hired actors.

It's just creative writing. Writing books is fun because they have a theme. Like for example: you could write a book about the Devil. Make it really dark and sadistic, if you know how to be twisted through creative storytelling and creative aspects to writing.

When you write, you need to get in character. This includes in your narrative. As an artist, we're trained to write not in one way, but in a lot of different ways, because if you go around writing the same way all the time, you're going to be boring to read.