The one thing your characters should never say (and what they should say instead)

There’s one particular line of dialogue that can often be tempting to put into your fiction, because you tell yourself that you’re just trying to reflect the way people speak in real life.

But, if a line of dialogue doesn’t either tell us something about the character who’s speaking, or move the action of the story forward in some way, it should be eliminated — even if you think it “sounds like real life.”