The Case Against Dialogue

Convincing, realistic speech is an essential part of any work of fiction. Or is it?

Convincing dialogue is hard to write. Well, it's hard for me. When I write fiction, my characters sound wooden, unreal, and generally unbelievable. Making a character talk like a real person, but still making it readable, is a skill that separates great writers from mediocre writers.

In a work of fiction, you want your reader to identify with the characters, to believe that they are real people, and to care about what happens to them. And the guaranteed way to destroy that illusion is to have them deliver phoney dialogue. Or to have them use the wrong mannerisms and speech patterns for the type of character they are supposed to be. There's a comedy sketch where Michael Caine, playing Sir Walter Raleigh, finds Queen Elizabeth in the arms of a rival. In the accent that made Caine famous, he delivers the immortal line: "Oi! You! Get your bladdy 'ands off the Queen". It's intended as a funny line. But in a serious movie, it would forever destroy the illusion that Michael Caine is Sir Walter Raleigh. The same effect would destroy your work of fiction.

It may seem that if you can't master good dialogue, you can't write good fiction. Dialogue is an essential element of storytelling.

Or is it? I'll try to show you how dialogue, no matter how skillfully rendered, can actually be detrimental to your fiction.

Consider this passage from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Linton is speaking to Catherine:

"Papa talks enough of my defects, and shows enough scorn of me, to make it natural I should doubt myself. I doubt whether I am not altogether as worthless as he calls me, frequently; and then I feel so cross and bitter, I hate everybody!"

What is wrong with this dialogue? Well, it's unrealistic. No, I don't mean in the way that the language sounds stiff to our modern ears. The language is believable for a man of Linton's class and education in the time and place where he lived. No, what destroys the realism of this passage is it should not exist at all.

Wuthering Heights is written in first person. This means that the narrator is there, involved in part of the action, and the text is written as "I did . . . I said . . .", not "He did . . . he said . . .". We are supposed to believe that the novel is not written by Emily Brontë but narrated by one of the characters, Mr. Lockwood.

At our point in the story, Nelly Dean is telling Lockwood of an event that happened some time previously. Her story is told in first person, and in it, Catherine tells Nelly of a still earlier event, in which Linton delivers the above dialogue to Catherine. (Try to keep up, there's a test at the end.)

So, Linton's dialogue is coming to the reader fourth hand, and we are supposed to believe that it is being delivered perfectly, word-for-word, with all of Linton's mannerisms and turns of phrase perfectly preserved? Catherine, Nelly Dean, and Lockwood himself are all such accomplished storytellers, with such perfect memories, that they can recite a casual conversation word-perfect? This is where our suspension of disbelief should start to sway a little.

Listen to somebody, in real life, tell you about an event they were involved in. They don't deliver perfect dialogue. They paraphrase. They tell you what the dialogue was about not what the dialogue actually was. When you tell your friend about your date last night, which would you say:

I said, "You look beautiful in that dress." She replied, "Oh, it's just an old thing I threw on."

Or:

I told her she was beautiful but she brushed it off.

You would say the latter. In the real world, Nelly would sum up Linton's speech, not attempt to repeat it verbatim. She might have said this to Lockwood:

Cathy said that Linton was telling her that Heathcliff pours scorn on him. This makes Linton feel worthless. That's why he feels cross and bitter and hates everybody, he said.

Now this is more like it. The story can skip dialogue completely and go for a more realistic approach to narration. And we writers whose dialogue skills are inadequate can "fake it". It could be argued that every first-person point-of-view story told in the past tense should be entirely free of dialogue.

There are writers who take this approach to dialogue, but they are in the minority. Lovecraft. Poe. Writers whose fiction is told mainly in first person, in which vivid descriptions and emotions are faithfully reported by the narrator but dialogue is left realistically vague and "second hand".

I have experimented with different styles of dialogue-free fiction. Apart from the first-person storytelling described above, there is scope for many different narrative techniques. A story about an animal, for example, doesn't need a single line of dialogue to be a gripping and realistic story. Or try a story presented as a collection of letters, a variation on the first-person narrative. (Stoker used this technique in Dracula, but he included vast tracts of dialogue reported with unrealistic accuracy.) Or consider a story told through a succession of newspaper articles, encyclopaedia entries, or biographical notes. No dialogue required there, though making such an avant garde narrative interesting would be a challenge of a different kind.

Or maybe you are one of those writers with a natural gift for dialogue. In which case I admire and envy you. I can't do it. And it's really frustrating.

Thanks for listening.

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