Noooooooooooo!
I’m not letting this thing die, I want some #*@|!!! feedback.
All good dialog is stylized to some degree. There are really only three purposes for dialog. One, to advance the plot. Two, to develop the chaaracters. Three, to play with the language for the sheer joy of it; some call this last one showing off. Great dialog does all three.
Good dialog isn’t any one thing or style. When I think of good dialog on the screen Quentin Tarantino, David Mamet and the Cohen Bros. come to mind, and they sound nothing like each other. On tv, Joss Whedon, David E. Kelly, and Aaron Sorkin come immediately to mind. Nobody could mistake Sorkin’s clipped, rapid-fire style (The West Wing) with Whedon’s more deliberate, hesitant offerings (Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
In print, Elmore Leonard uses his dialog primarily for character development, with spare descriptions of the action advancing the plot. Robert B. Parker does much the same, but has the luxury of first-person narration, and though less realistic sounding, is just as entertaining.
You do mine and I’ll do yours.
I’ve actually had a few thoughts on mine, re-reading it just now. Maybe I’ll post them later if no-one else wants to criticize it first.
All right, sounds fair. Just don’t pull any punches.
My first complaint is that your characters seemed to follow archetypes. I’m guilty of this as well, though I tried to do something interesting with those archetypes instead of just writing cliches. I don’t know how well I succeeded. As I scroll through the stories, everyone played the preconceived notion of what a smuggler/mercenary is. Not a good sign.
Everyone’s mercenary/smuggler is rough and dangerous, holding the bargaining power. Why isn’t the smuggler some little weasely guy who’s trying to get hired to transport them out? Maybe they turn the guy down and try to find a rough and dangerous mercenary for transport, but the little weasel keeps getting in the way. Any number of possibilities besides the grimy, macho street-tough.
But that’s a character complaint. The dialogue was sound. It accomplished the bare minimum of advancing the plot, but not a whole lot of characterization took place. Yeah, there were character lines, but it didn’t really expand on what we instantly imagine the characters as being.
I’m glancing over it again and the dialogue itself is sound. I wouldn’t call it exemplary dialogue, because the dialogue between the old man and the boy sound virtually interchangable. If the mercenary wasn’t swaggering, his dialogue would sound the same, too.
There might not be anything wrong with this, this is a complaint I have about a lot of popular novels. This is subjective, I imagine.
Again I have to emphasize how little characters are conveyed. I can’t really sympathize or empathize with any of them, and I certainly don’t find the smuggler interesting. He’s very reminiscent of… well, the classic smuggler. Nothing new here to explore.
Lastly, some of the smuggler’s dialogue is weird. " well all of a sudden like, " I’ve never heard anyone speak like that before. What I can’t tell is if you have heard that said before or if it sounded like something a gritty smuggler would say. (Why do all the smugglers seem uneducated and lacking poor hygiene? My guess is that you have to be pretty smart and able to get along with people to be a successful smuggler.)
Just my thoughts. If you want any elaboration or explanations, just let me know.
I tried to be fair and critical without worrying about offending you, so please be very critical in yours.
But I did go another way with the boy. Everyone else made him a wide-eyed innocent, while I decided to make him just naive enough not to realize when the mercenary was just spinning him a bargaining line. That and foolish enough to lose his temper while negotiating,
I had hoped to show that my mercenary was all talk, the way he dropped all objections and went obsequious when it came to payment.
True, but I didn’t want to make things too long. I do try and hint at the relationship between the old man and boy, and previous events. I looked on it as a reasonable opening. I don’t care for too much wordy dialogue from any one character at these stages, as they tend to sound too much like weak plot devices to fill the reader in as quickly as possible.
So the old man doesn’t sound like he’s wiser with a whole lot less bluster?
‘All of a sudden like’ is supposed to be sarcasm. It’s showing that the smuggler is very aware of how people regard him and is smarter than he’s given credit for.
All in all I think the mercenary is the more interesting character here. On re-reading it I did have doubts on his speech patterns, as I never quite decided if he was going to be archaically spoken or not. Consequently he has a bit of a mixture. This, actually, might be an interesting aspect of his background.
The old man may be interesting, as he’s far more in control of the situation than either of the other characters are aware. The boy is kind of irritating. I’d probably kill him off somewhere along the line. 
Don’t worry about offending. You were very constructive. I will follow this up with a crit on yours…
*Jenkins and Henry exchanged anxious glances. *
The very first line is at odds with the rest of the story and confuses the reader. Everything about Henry suggests that as a naive kid he is maybe nervous, but mostly oblivious to the subtleties of the interactions around him. He does not ‘exchange nervous glances’.
nor did he read anything into the pair of breasts he found pushed into his face when she delivered the nachos, putting the snack at the far side of the table.
Confusing sentence. The first part is mixing two similar experiences with completely different results. He’s failing to ‘read the pair of breasts’, yet ‘finding them’ at the same time. He either notices it, or he doesn’t, this is having it both ways. The end doesn’t make sense. She putting the snack at the far side of the table, yet simultaneously sticking her assets in his face?
Jenkins glared reproachfully for a few seconds, but clearly Henry had no idea.
Of what? Also suggests that Jenkins is the primary source of action and timing at this point, when it’s Snake’s approuch that matters.
lean or bouncy in all the right places
This makes sense, but at first read sounds like you’re not sure which. I would have gone for ‘lean, but bouncy in all the right places’.
Henry wished she wouldn’t cuss like that, but so far she had laughed whenever he made a suggestion on how to improve her virtues.
She almost seemed to be getting worse.
The wrong time to make these observations. It gives the impression that Henry knows Snake quite well, possibly from long association, but elsewhere you get the idea they have just met and Jenkins has introduced them. The reader is puzzled how Henry can be so naive, yet be familiar with Snake. So you start to think maybe this is Jenkins’ thinking this and maybe you already have the two characters confused.
“What do I mean?” she laughed.
Are we missing a bit of dialogue here? This doesn’t appear to be in reply to anything.
I’m not about to tell you a sob story, but you better understand how much pain and grief his daddy causes to us down here. No one deserves the kind of grief and hardship we’ve had put on us, especially not because we simply disagree with the mad fucker."
Another ugly passage. Repetition of ‘and grief’, ‘grief and’ for no real purpose. The second is almost totally surplus to requirements. Try:
“No one deserves what we’ve had put on us,”
Henry would simply not have this whore talk about his father that way.
I stumble over the split ‘would not’. Henry simply would not…
He was about to press on with his admonishment
Why pause here? Why ‘about to?’ I would say: He would have pressed on with his admonishment, but was completely taken aback… Much punchier and makes the laugh more sudden.
“This burns me!” he exclaimed, horrified.
A bit passive for an exclamation, isn’t it? Why not: “That burns!”
To wrap up, You’d maybe get away with some of these flaws (or not have them as flaws at all) if we knew the characters better. But as it is it’s a bit confusing at times. Jenkins’ relationship to Snake is never made clear or even hinted at and, despite being the dominant character at the start seems to vanish from the situation once Snake appears.
Henry is suppose to be naive, yet you use his point of view to fill out a lot of the knowing observations. Jenkins would be a lot better at this. If you want to use Henry’s point of view it has to be totally without insight or wrong to a degree that the reader can only appreciate through more time than this short passage can achieve.
The dialogue, to get back to the OP, is pretty good. You just need to be a bit more careful in identifying who’s saying what, as I lost track a couple of times. You follow on one person’s thoughts with another character’s dialogue in a couple of places.
These are fun. I like sparse.
The boy followed the old man, not trusting his own instincts in the seedy bar.
They approached a man in a shadowed booth. The old man whispered that he was a mercenary and had a ship.
“I’ve heard you have a ship,” the old man said.
The man nodded. The boy realized he was seeing a real live mercenary.
“We’d like passage on it,” the old man continued.
“I’ve little room for passengers,” the merc said.
“We have money.”
This seemed to win the merc’s full attention. He looked past them. “Sit down. Where?”
The boy and the old man settled into the booth. “Alderaan,” said the old man.
“Out of my way.” A long pause. “Two thousand, cash.”
“We can pay one now and the government will pay two when we get there.”
The merc looked uneasy for a brief moment, but it passed. “What are you carrying?”
“Me, the boy, two droids, and no questions.”
The merc chuckled.
“A thousand’s a lot of money for a-” the boy started, but the old man cut him off. “He’s good with his hands, if you need any repairs done. It’s a long trip.”
“That’s fantastic,” the merc said. “But I don’t need repairs.”
The old man said nothing then, silent. The boy, sensing a quiet battle, did the same.
The merc looked annoyed. “That was no,” he said.
The old man rose. The boy mirrored him.
As they left, the merc said, offhandedly, “Try Solo over there. He’s always desperate.”
One of the only useful things I can remember being told by my writing course professors is that dialogue needs to be broken up with actions and description. I’m still working on mastering that… what do you think of this? Am I getting the hang of it or not? I don’t have time to write out a decent mercenary scene, but this is towards the beginning of a fan fic (Mulder’s Creek, a sort of X-Files/Dawson’s Creek deal.) but the most recent fiction thing I’ve written. The characters are 16, if having that context helps you understand.
4:30pm, at the Ice House
Scully shuts the door to the storage room so she can mope in private. Watching Mulder run after Fowley hurt worse than she could bear to admit. No matter how hard she tried to, she couldn’t figure out why Mulder wanted Fowley…and not her.
It wasn’t until there was a knock at the door that she realizes she’d been crying. “Just a second.” She says, quickly rubbing away her tears. She takes a deep breath and tries to put on a calm face before opening the door. “ Sorry, I was putting something up on a shelf behind the door.
“ Okay.” Skinner says. “ I think you missed a spot.” He reaches and brushes a tear she missed off her cheek.
“Damn. I thought I’d gotten them all.”
“ Your eyes and cheeks are all red, so I would have noticed anyway. You want to talk about it?”
She shrugs, sits on a crate, and looks at her hands. “What’s wrong with me?” She whispers.
“Hey,” Skinner says, squeezing her shoulder. “ It’s not you that there’s something wrong with. Mulder’s the one who’s wrong.”
“You don’t understand. You and Reyes just moved here, you don’t know what it’s been like growing up with him. It’s like I’ve always been his friend, and I was just waiting for him to get past the ‘girls are icky’ stage to really notice me. Then he finally does get to that point, and notices her instead.”
“ Maybe you don’t know it, but he notices you too. You should have seen the look he gave you when you first got to the Halloween party. ‘Girls are icky’ is not what was written all over his face. “
“ Then why?” She demands, throwing her hands in the air.
“ I think you scare him.” Skinner says.
“ Me? I’m hardly an imposing figure.”
“ It’s not anything you’ve done, just who you are.”
“ That’s so much better.” She says unhappily.
“ No, you don’t understand. What I mean is that a lot of guys get scared if they realize too young that they’re found someone perfect for them. So they run the other way to avoid the inevitable. “
“ So when do they stop running?” She asks.
“ Depends on the guy.” Skinner says.
“ If you weren’t gay I’d kiss you.” Scully says, giving him a hug. “Thanks, I sort of feel better, at least about myself.”
“No problem.”
elfkin477, your dialogue is sound and breaks up fine, but the present tense really throws me for a loop.
Gomez, I’m gonna print up your story and read it while I exercise.
Futile Gesture, critique to follow.
Cut “at”.
Nice, though I’d say “you’re” instead of “you are.”
No one can smile anything. What about “…anyone overboard.” The mercenary’s humorless smile revealed two rows of rotten stumps.
Actually should be a dash instead of ellipses. “…dealing with–”
Very confusing dialogue. Try to say it out loud. What about:
“I’ve seen a lot in my time, boy, and one thing I know is that when the time comes for wars and dying, suddenly everyone wants to talk to me. Wouldn’t be seen under the same roof with me the day before, but all of a sudden they’re cryin’ by the dockside, all wanting my humble ship and offering me no end of riches for the pleasure of my company.”
Drop the “he said”. No need for it. Has more power with just:
the old man pulled the boy aside and painfully rose to his feet. “Here.” He held out his hand to reveal the jewel they’d gone to such lengths to keep just a week ago. “I’m sure that will be enough.”
Nice.
Oh, it’s in the present tense because it’s a mock tv show that’s airing “now.” Sort of blow by blow commentary. It makes the people who are reading it happy, so that’s the important thing
[minor hijack]
Addressing the OP, if you really want to learn to do dialogue, I recommend joining a free-form roleplaying group online. FFR is also known as interactive storytelling, so some of you may know it as that. You create a character and place that character into a situation where they’ll interact with a bunch of other characters, and… it’s fun. The character’s actions and dialogue are determined solely by you, as opposed to a roll of the dice, which is what makes it free-form. FFR can be difficult to get into at first, but once you get some practice you’ll find that writing the dialogue and actions for your character becomes second nature. Hearing the character’s voice in your head and figuring out whether their dialogue sounds realistic or not is a skill that’s rapidly acquired in the realm of free-form. I’ve been at it for more than three years now and I can honestly say that my abilities with dialogue have FAR improved, much more so even than when I was churning out a play a month through high school.
Then, of course, there’s learning to write in an accent… 
[/minor hijack]
Thanks for the advice. While I’m still a new writer with a lot to learn, even regarding dialogue, my OP was more about other writers, specifically published ones, who can’t seem to write natural sounding dialogue.
As for accents, I’ve decided not to ever do them. I can’t emulate accents out loud, so I should never try to emulate them on paper. Ah could do Southern (US) in small chunks simply 'cause ah grew up around it, but it’s so hard ta read.
Very wise. Nothing kills a character’s credibility more efficiently than the writer trying to give them an accent and getting it wrong. Unless you know the accent well, and preferable even speak it yourself, leave it alone! It also can make things difficult to read. Far better to mention the accent, maybe hint a little in their speech, and then leave the reader to fill it out if they want.