A Word About Dialogue

I love dialogue. If truth be known, and of course it is because you can see it in my books, dialogue is what I do best. I enjoy plotting and description, but if I'm brutally honest, my dialogue is better than either of those two.
Part of this is because my training-- and my MFA-- were in screenwriting, a very dialogue-driven form. You don't get long-winded descriptions in screenplays. Action and dialogue move it along.
It's also because I've always been fascinated by the way people talk. I minored in linguistics simply because phonetics and accents have always intrigued me. From an early age I was writing down overheard conversations and interchanges (much to the dismay of my elder sisters when she thought she was alone with her friends).
But here's what I want to tell beginning writers: Do not use verbatim dialogue. Make it up and it will sound more "real." Example: You're watching the news and suddenly there's a story about a 911 call. They run a caption of each person's comments (the same has been done of phone calls of the British royals or of various U.S. Presidents). And what do you find? A lot of "y'knows," a lot of interrupting, a lot of sentences that evaporate into nothing, a lot of "uh-huhs." People are not articulate wonders. They meander, they stammer, they repeat themselves.
So, ironically, to sound "real" you have to edit out all this fringe stuff. Authentic-sounding dialogue includes brisk interchange and even misunderstandings, but you have to stop short of it being absolutely real.
Beginning writers think they have to be absolutely true to the moment (and if it's nonfiction, then quotes should be accurate), but if you're crafting a story, you're going to have to be a lot more entertaining than a 911 dispatcher.