Conflict in Dialogue - How to make your characters bicker and banter

"I was thinking of going fishing today," said Bob. "Perfect weather."

"Perfect?" Hubert raised an eyebrow. "Just look at the sky!"
"Fish like water." Bob shrugged. "Figure the rain'll make 'em swim to the surface."
"You idiot! What do you know about fishing anyway?"
"A load more than you do!" Bob glowered at the other man.
"Oh yeah? Well, I've got more sense than to buy your garbage about fish liking rain."
"You just don't wanna get wet, you wimp."

A great way to create tension between two characters is to make them bicker. The more they bicker, the more tension. If you really want to make things tough between them, make them unable to even hold a conversation. Every time one of them tries to talk about something normal, the other should twist the conversation off track and nitpick everything they say. The characters should focus their assault on one another specifically. ("You idiot! What do you know about fishing anyway?" instead of "That's dumb. They're already surrounded by water, why would they care about a little rain?"). This is the tension-building aspect of the bickering; there is tension between the characters, not over the conversation topic. The reason they're bickering is because they have a problem with each other, not with what each other are saying. Otherwise, they could have an intelligent debate like this:

"I was thinking of going fishing today," said Bob. "Perfect weather."
"Perfect?" Hubert raised an eyebrow. "It's raining, which isn't the best weather for fishing."
"Fish like water." Bob shrugged. "Figure the rain'll make 'em swim to the surface."
"Actually, that's not true," Hubert said. "The raindrops stir the water's surface, and the fish will swim lower to escape the turbulence."

There's not much inter-character-tension going on here. The characters will either come to a satisfactory resolution, or the debate could escalate into a fight. It might even destroy the relationship between the characters altogether. This would be a different, larger-scale type of conflict than the tension created by bickering. With bickering, the characters' relationship is going to drag on for a long time, unless they do finally have a big fight and go their separate ways.

You can experiment with different levels of conflict to create tension or all-out fights as needed. Bickering will be over more random, mundane things, but fighting is about important stuff, like which character gets to infiltrate the palace to steal the treasure.

Bickering can also be friendly. It can be a sign of comfortableness between characters and shows that they've known each other for a long time or have been through a lot together. This type of bickering should be good-natured, and much of what makes it seem good-natured is the characters' expressions, tones, and body language, rather than their actual words. Compare the first example of tension bickering with the following friendly bickering.

"I was thinking of going fishing today," said Bob. "Perfect weather."
"Perfect?" Hubert raised an eyebrow. "Just look at the sky!"
"Fish like water." Bob shrugged. "Figure the rain'll make 'em swim to the surface."
"You idiot! What do you know about fishing anyway?"
"A load more than you do!" Bob laughed.
"Oh yeah?" Hubert's lips twisted in a smirk. "Well, I've got more sense than to buy your garbage about fish liking rain."
"You just don't wanna get wet, you wimp." Bob punched Hubert's arm.

An important element of distinguishing between the two types of bickering is context. Technically, the first example of bickering could be friendly bickering. My siblings and I engage in such activity, with all the glowers and sneers, but it is in no way mean, and half the time our act will disintegrate into laughter. To an outsider, it might appear that we don't really like each other. But if an outsider got to know us better, they would realize that we actually love each other and this is just a part of how we have fun together. So if you have this sort of character relationship in your story, the reader will know what's going on in your story and know enough about the characters that you could use the first type of bickering, and it would seem friendly.

Venturing further into the realm of friendly conflict, another form of conflict is humor. I have struggled a lot with bringing humor to the page, even though I am a very humorous person in real life, and so I have done a ton of research and have read just about every humor-writing article on the internet. Most of them were rather unhelpful ("there's no way to 'learn' how to write humor; you either have it or you don't") but a few really zeroed in on an important element of writing humor: Humor is conflict. It's a different method of coping with conflict than arguing. Instead of bickering about a situation or through a conversation, have your characters make jokes or light banter about it.

I've never had a problem writing arguments, so I adapted bickering so that the characters use one another's statements to propel themselves deeper into the joke, building each other's *side* up along with their own, rather than trying to undermine each other's *side*.

"I was thinking of going fishing today," said Bob. "Perfect weather."
"Perfect?" Hubert raised an eyebrow. "Well, I s'pose so, if you're a rain person."
"Exactly. Fish live in water. Figure they'll be so happy for more, they'll swim right to the surface."
"You've gone fishing...what, once? What do you know?"
"A load more than you do!" Bob glowered at the other man.
"Oh yeah? Maybe about fishing, but not about logical fallacy."
"You just don't wanna get wet, you wimp."

Now let's take all of this information to delve deeper and analyze the inner workings of bickering vs. humorous/friendly bantering:

Bickering:

"I was thinking of going fishing today," said Bob. "Perfect weather." [Bob starts off with an innocent suggestion.]
"Perfect?" Hubert raised an eyebrow. "Just look at the sky!" [Hubert finds something to disagree with. Notice how he didn't disagree about going fishing. He doesn't necessarily want to win the fight; he just wants to make tension between himself and Bob.]
"Fish like water." Bob shrugged. "Figure the rain'll make 'em swim to the surface." [Bob defends his position.]
"You idiot! What do you know about fishing anyway?" [Hubert makes a personal attack on Bob, diverting the argument away from the original topic and focusing on the real, underlying problem: Bob.]
"A load more than you do!" Bob glowered at the other man. [Bob defends himself with a counterattack. Notice that he doesn't claim that he knows much about fishing. Instead, he tries to divert the topic onto Hubert.]
 "Oh yeah? Well, I've got more sense than to buy your garbage about fish liking rain." [Hubert doesn't deny that Bob knows more than he does about fishing, but he defends his attacked intelligence while at the same time disparaging Bob's intelligence.]
"You just don't wanna get wet, you wimp." [Bob exposes Hubert's supposed real motives and thus takes further offensive.]

Humorous/friendly banter:

"I was thinking of going fishing today," said Bob. "Perfect weather." [Bob starts off with an innocent suggestion.]
"Perfect?" Hubert raised an eyebrow. "Well, I s'pose so, if you're a rain person." [Hubert does not openly disagree with Bob. Instead, he takes a side element of Bob's statement and first questions and then resolves it.]
"Exactly. Fish live in water. Figure they'll be so happy for more, they'll swim right to the surface." [Bob gives more evidence for his view.]
"You've gone fishing...what, once? What do you know?" [Hubert doubts Bob's view. Here, the conversation turns from agreement to disagreement, but because of the set-up will maintain lightheartedness.]
"A load more than you do!" Bob glowered at the other man.
"Oh yeah? Maybe about fishing, but not about logical fallacy."
"You just don't wanna get wet, you wimp."

How do you incorporate tension into your dialogue? Are your characters constantly bickering and do you want to lighten them up with some humor, or vice versa? Do you have any conflict-hacks? Share in the comments!

-- E. C. Jaeger