Greetings WW.

I was wondering the community's thoughts on dialogue. I've been reading much of the higher end short fiction lately. The majority of the pieces have little to no dialogue. Is it considered not high-level or skillful to have characters talking with quotes ""? Of course there is a certain balance that needs to be achieved, but none? Thoughts in any direction are welcome.

TheGodfather

I would say that dialogue has a place in any fiction, really.

Wouldn't it be interesting to yank out twenty - thirty books at random and rank them low, medium or high interms of dialogue and then to try to class the books as commercial or literary (which would be a more difficult task).

I might just do that right now.

Ani

Okay, I have just looked at twenty books. I tried to rate them from 1 to 5 (1 = no dialogue and 5 = full of dialogue), and then rated the book as L = Literary or C = commercial, though most of them seemed to fall onthe literary side, so that's probably not going to be too helpful, except that certain books are nevertheless commercially successfull whereas others haven't been especially.

I have also noticed that some books that ended up having plenty of dialoguie began with very little as the author was establishing characters or the scene, while other books jumped straight right into dialogue from the first page.

Partly, I think the more/less dialogue questions comes down to some writers just being gregarious, and others more introspective.

But there does seem to be a slight pattern emerging in support of Godfather's hypothesis, however flawed my research.

M Bragg, Josh Lawton 4L
P Ackroyd, First Light 4L
J Adams, Single White E-mail 5C
K Aldridge, Pop 2L
I Allende, Daughter of Fortune 3CL
K Amis, Biographer's Moustache 5L
A Lobo Antunes, Act of the damned 5L
T M Ansa, Baby of the Family 4L
J Astley, Excess Baggage 5C
K Atkinson, Emotionally Weird 4L
M Atwood, Life Before Man 3L
B Bainbridge, Every Man for Himself 5L
I Banks, Complicity 5LC
G Baratham, Moonrise, Sunset 4L
N Barker, Wide Open 5L
L de Bernieres, War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts 2L
S Benatar, The Man on the Bridge 5L
R Bennett, The Second Prison 5L
J Biguenet, Oyster 4L
H Bouazza, Abdullah's Feet 2L


So......... there are my results.

Ani

Ani,

Well done! Perhaps Mori or BMRB might be interested in your research services?

The Godfather has raised an interesting point to which my answer would be that a good writer knows how much or how little dialogue to include.

I did ask myself if one could write a short story using only dialogue. Then I realised that a script for a radio short might well do this, of course leaving out voice over and sound effects. Any takers?

Thanks Godfather.

Len

Len,

What are Mori and BMRB? :-)

It was quite interesting looking throug all those books. There is dialogue that looks like dialogue, but isn't especially. Or isolated lines of speech, so they're not dialogue.

Of the books I looked at, I think Kitty Aldridge's book Pop had the least real dialogue in it.

Ani

I think dialogue is massively important. I love it when I am reading a book and I come to the dialogue, I think it gives you that picture of authenticity and being in the book with the characters.

I read a Philip Roth book which contained nothing but dialogue - 'Deception', I think, and was engrossed in it.(Although I suspect it may not have been published without the reputation of a published writer.)

I try to put in a load of dialogue in my stuff, and spookily enough I just been reading Chap 5 of Skippoo's 'Tash and Kev' which has so much dialogue, and is true and honest because of it...and more.

"What do you think?"
"Yeah, I agree mate."

Soz!

Dave

Ani,

Mori are the Organisers of the polls and other research that we hear about usually at Election times. BMRB is short for British Market Research Bureau... both 'quality' services.

Len

My original thread was asking more about short stories, short fiction. In much of the award winning short stories, The O'Henry Award Winners, America's Best Short Stories, etc., little to no dialogue is present. I could not understand that. I can vouch completely for the genre of novels - it needs dialogue and has much of it. A novel without dialogue would be boring. What about short stories?

TheGodfather

Aha!

Another research project!

Will look into it, and put it on my CV to .... what's it? ... Mori and BMRB!

Ani

Excellent short stories can have little or no dialogue... there again dialogue can be a fundamental in 'making' a short story.

I did appreciate that you were referring to short stories, this is why my mind turned to the challenge of writing a short that consisted entirely of dialogue. You have raised an interesting topic to which there is no 'answer' but perhaps others may have more definitive opinions?

Len

It seems that pop fiction goes for more dialogue than literary fiction. Its more 'up to the minute'. Also, as time goes by, little dialogue seems to elicit disapproval from readers - including many critics on this site.

James Joyce 'got away with' very little dialogue. Some of his short stories have almost none. O Henry too. But then, these days, modern readers are not so much inclined to take long stretches of speechless narrative.

At the moment I am reading Anne Radcliffe's The Italian (1796) God, she takes an age to get into it! But then I am tolerant of this and accept it as my own need to adapt to the time.

Hamburger Yogi

Hi God.
I'm not sure there is an answer to your question. I agree with what Len said, and think that how much or how little dialogue is involved in a short story depends on all the other elements involved, and what the function of the dialogue is in the story, and it might have more than one, as dialogue can be a brilliant tool to set emotion, mood, make characters come alive, avoid exposition etc. I guess balancing dialogue within a story is just a matter of experience.
Becca.

Why are there so many supposed 'rules' with short stories, anyway? No other medium has this to such an extent. It annoys the hell out of me, to be honest. Sod it all and write what you wanna write, that's what I say!

Cath

p.s. Thanks for the mention of Tash & Kev there, Nudgy! I'm reading some of your stuff right now (I am desperately bored at work today - no tearful Wandsworth kids have come to seek my help, despite it being GCSE results day....)

<Added>

p.ps. I didn't mean I'd only read your work when desperately bored, I meant that's why I'm not doing what I'm paid to do at this time of day!

Hi Cath. I don't think they're rules, they're just tools.
Becca.

Cath & Becca,

They sure seem like absolute rules of the trade though. So many 'make sure to do this' and 'don't do that' it makes your head spin at times trying to keep them all in the corral. If they published a book, a list of the 473 things writers need to remember and included a packet of checklists that writers can check off as they edit, that sure would be gracious of them. Until then, back to the guessing board.

TheGodfather