Scenes without dialogue

There aren't too many "Have to's" in writing. I do scenes sometimes where there's no dialogue at all. So do plenty of writers.

The rule, as always is: keep it interesting. And if there's no call for dialogue, don't try to force any in.

It's fine, if it's done well. The problem with mostly-internal thoughts and introspection, etc. without dialogue is that your readers can be bogged down by too much psychology and not enough external events. It can get boring (unless you have something really interesting going on) and claustrophobic.

IMHO, the rule of thumb is that a scene should advance the story. One method is through dialogue but there are many other techniques. I'm working on a first person POV novel and there are some scenes where my POV narrator is alone and thinking about what's happening. What I'm trying to do in those scenes is to make sure she's doing something else besides sitting and thinking. There's always a connection to the physical world around her.

PeeDee said:

The rule, as always is: keep it interesting. And if there's no call for dialogue, don't try to force any in.

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Yeah, I've noticed several-page scenes in published works that contain no dialogue, not even characters' thoughts. They work. If you find yourself writing a scene that seems to resist your every attempt at adding dialogue, don't force the issue.

TheIT said:

What I'm trying to do in those scenes is to make sure she's doing something else besides sitting and thinking.

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Yes. Nothing is deadlier than long stretches of internal thought.

caw

alaskamatt17 said:

Yeah, I've noticed several-page scenes in published works that contain no dialogue, not even characters' thoughts. They work. If you find yourself writing a scene that seems to resist your every attempt at adding dialogue, don't force the issue.

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I agree. And I can think of all sorts of books that don't have dialogue or internal thought for pages at a time. Terry Pratchett does it a lot. You can make it sound just as interesting and relaxed and comfortable as dialogue, but without actually having anyone say anything.

John Irving is masterful at writing without dialogue. I'd have to say his books are downright sparse when it comes to words spoken by his characters, yet I think he's one of the great writers of our age.

Give your characters voices in their head. That should keep them occupied.

ChunkyC said:

John Irving is masterful at writing without dialogue. I'd have to say his books are downright sparse when it comes to words spoken by his characters, yet I think he's one of the great writers of our age.

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John Irving is a god. And such an interesting man to listen to speak. And one of the few writers I would *NOT* step into a boxing ring with....

Ms.Write said:

There are times when a character is alone, we are in his or her thoughts, and there is no external dialogue. I have one or two scenes like this in my WIP so far.

Are there any rules about keeping this type of scene to a minimum? Or does EVERY scene have to have dialogue?

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I'm writing a memoir and I have a LOT of these scenes in my WIP. I love them personally. I think it really helps paint a clear picture of where the character (myself in this example) is coming from. I think they are necessary scenes. I'm sure too many would make for a good journal read but with the right story it will all work together.

I had this problem with one of my short stories (its in SYW lit section). I had the MC talk to himself instead. It brought something to the story that made it much better.

Beware of the dreaded sittin' and thinkin' scenes. If all the character is doing is sitting there and thinking (or standing up and thinking or walking down the street and thinking or driving a car and thinking or any other such non-eventful action and thinking) for several pages, it's going to kill your pacing dead, the reader is going to yawn, the book will be set down and possibly never picked up again. These are the parts that people skip (from the famous advice, "don't write the parts that people skip").

Consider whether this section of thinking can be interspersed with a more active scene, where there is dialogue. (The problem isn't really the lack of dialogue, per se, it's the lack of an external antagonist, a second person in the scene. You can have an active, silent scene, where two characters are struggling for a gun or for the finish line of a race or whatever. What's problematic is a scene where only one character is doing anything, b/c there's no external conflict, just sittin' and thinkin'.) Try to figure out where she could be thinking the same things, but in the context of someone external forcing her to make a decision. Someone says something, and she thinks, "hmm, maybe I've been wrong all my life," but resists believing it, and so on. Have a person pushing her, arguing with her, instead of just having her sitting there, static, and thinking "hmm, maybe I've been wrong all my life."

Sittin' and thinkin' is an absolute killer to your pacing.

JD

It's fun to hold this thread up against the "telling tales in dialogue" thread, in that they both touch on different sides of the same issue.

Somewhere during the wrting of my WIP, I was told to use dialogue and a lot of it to advance the story. It all came back to show and not tell.
As a result I forced myself to add dialogs whereas my story writing is of a different style.
Then I sent out some of my original chapters to beta readers and one of my questions was should I use more dialog. And they all said no, the scenes flowed smoothly without dialog.
Now when I'm doing my edit I actually do feel that in the places where I forced myself to write dialog, it seems stilted and unnecessary breaking the flow of my writing. So I am having to revise all of that.

The point I'm making is that it depends on your style and voice. I have learnt that dialogs are just a tool in story writing. Use them as you see fit. I am not saying there should be no dialog; just that don't force yourself into writing dialog if it's not required and the scene advances.

All things are just tools, when it comes to writing (including some authors and editors ) you can use dialogue, or not. You can use ALL dialogue, or none. Whatever. The only real requirement at the end of the day is that someone, somewhere, can read and enjoy. Preferably more than one person, really.

Instead of showing characters thinking, I often mention a problem, then have the characters doing something like making dinner, and then return to problem after that task. This shows they were thinking about it while they were doing whatever (hopefully interesting) thing they were doing.

JanDarby said:

The problem isn't really the lack of dialogue, per se, it's the lack of an external antagonist, a second person in the scene.

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Is that really the only cause? I'd think it's the lack of tension itself, rather than the lack of an external source of said tension.

Narrative tension is a little like trying to sew a seam by hand, I think. If you don't pull firmly on the thread, you'll end up with sloppiness and gaps in the seam; you may have a shirt when you're done, but it'll fall apart the first time you wash it. But if you pull too hard, the seam bunches and the shirt looks funny when it's done.

For all I don't consciously use it, the "scene and sequel" method works on this principle, as far as I can tell--scenes introduce tension so the seam comes together tighly, and sequels release tension so the fabric doesn't bunch.

I'd think it's the lack of tension itself, rather than the lack of an external source of said tension.

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Okay, but how do you get tension? You get it with two characters in a struggle. If you've only got one character, how much tension can you have? The character is sitting there and thinking. What happens if she doesn't resolve whatever she's thinking about? Not much. She shrugs and goes to bed. What happens if she does resolve whater she's thinking about? She shrugs and goes to bed, with the intent of doing something the next morning. But there's no tension, unless someone is forcing her to think about the topic in a new way, forcing her to resolve the topic now. Why think about it NOW, when she could have thought about it any time in the previous day/week/month or could think about it at any time in the future? You get the answer to that when someone is in the scene with her, forcing her to address the issue, not letting her cop out, not letting her get stuck in the same old mental circles she's gotten caught in previously. Someone is there forcing her to have consequences for not resolving the issue.

Now, there are times when there's tension left over from the previous scene, where there's an external antagonist off in the wings somwhere, not necessarily in the same room with the protagonist. Pratchett's books come to mind. There are times where Sam Vimes (the protagonist) is on his way somewhere or is sitting at his desk, trying to figure out the clues to his problem, b/c it's the first chance he's had to sort them out. Sounds like classic sitting and thinking. But I think if you look closely, you'll see that there's a time limit and a very real, very physical consequence -- he has to sort things out or the dragon will come back and fry the city or the psychopathic murderer from the future will kill his father so he'll never be born, so there's almost an implied antagonist in the room with him. He's not just sitting there thinking about how his great-grandfather was maligned as a regicide, and how everyone now treats him as if he's going to start swinging an axe, killing the next available king, and maybe he ought to just give up and move to Four-Ecks. He's got an immediate problem with defined consequences, imposed on him, if not by a person in the same room with him, at least by a person (okay, or a dragon; this is sf/f, after all) at a distance.

But then again, Pratchett is a genius, and he can carry off a scene with the antagonist not in the same room. For most of us, if we try to write a scene with just one person (and, really, that's the problem, not the lack of dialogue; the lack of dialogue is the symptom of the problem), it's likely going to be of the "my life sucks, and I don't know what to do about it" variety. For the most part, keeping in mind that story = two characters in a struggle is going to improve any scene you write.

As to Scene & Sequel, I think there's great stuff in the book, but the one place where I diverge is with the suggestion that a sequel can go on for page after page after page without completely killing the story dead. I agree that you need to release the tension occasionally, which is what sequel is good for, along with comic relief, but a sequel can be done in a line or a paragraph or two, without going on for enough pages that anyone will think, "Hey, it's been a while since there was any dialogue."

JD

JanDarby said:

Okay, but how do you get tension? You get it with two characters in a struggle. If you've only got one character, how much tension can you have? The character is sitting there and thinking. What happens if she doesn't resolve whatever she's thinking about?

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That's one way, and it's a popular and very useful way, but it's not the only way. One doesn't need a second character on-screen to have an active and vital scene.

Other, non-other-character, sources of tension:

+ Ticking clocks (in the story sense, though also in the real clock-sense, but then that would fall into the next item) (a character dying of cancer, frex)
+ Environmental cues
+ Puzzles that interest a reader
+ Voyeurism (not nec., but including, sexual)
+ A character doing something they shouldn't be doing.
+ The threat of personal harm, self-inflicted or from a non-sentient source + Language structured in such a way as to evoke tension.
+ Things lying beneath the surface; and, relatedly, the implication that beneath any surface is a layer we can't see (we like to think we know everything, but we know so little, and what we don't know frightens us; fright is a strong form of tension)
+ Reader knowledge where the character does not have knowledge

We agree, I think, that sitting and thinking rarely interests the reader beyond a paragraph. But there's a ton of other stuff that can happen while a character thinks through whatever's going on; the character doesn't have to be sitting in their bedroom, and the character categorically does not need to be physically opposed by an antagonist character to create tension.

JanDarby said:

But I think if you look closely, you'll see that there's a time limit and a very real, very physical consequence -- he has to sort things out or the dragon will come back and fry the city or the psychopathic murderer from the future will kill his father so he'll never be born, so there's almost an implied antagonist in the room with him.

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These are very workable, and very useful, techniques. They're not the be-all and end-all, though.

JanDarby said:

For most of us, if we try to write a scene with just one person (and, really, that's the problem, not the lack of dialogue; the lack of dialogue is the symptom of the problem), it's likely going to be of the "my life sucks, and I don't know what to do about it" variety. For the most part, keeping in mind that story = two characters in a struggle is going to improve any scene you write.

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No offense, Jan, but your definition seems to be off.

"A story can be two characters in a struggle" is a valid statement, true.

Show me the two characters struggling through the island scene in Tom Hanks' Cast Away, please? In White fang?

A better definition might be "Story = the struggle of a character to overcomes frustration while actively seeking achievement of a goal." That's a useful definition, if not perfect.

An old line goes "'The King died, and then the Queen died'" is not a story; 'The King died, and then the Queen died of grief' is."

To wrap up: I think you're right in that your method will produce a scene, but I also think it's not the only way. I recommend that you look deeper into exactly what it is that you respond as a reader to in a scene--not just the tension itself, but the source of the tension.

I know that there are a few -- very few -- exceptions to "two characters in a struggle" as a description of story (and that definition comes from, among other places, Dwight Swain and the guy who wrote the book Story and assorted other folks who are far more expert than I am), but for a good 99.9% of stories, especially among people still working on the first or second manuscript, the fact that there's only person in a scene is a problem. It's a great big red flag that there's no conflict, no tension, no reason for the reader to keep reading.

If a writer says, "I've got this really amazing scene, and ya' know what, I just realized there's no dialogue in it," I'm not going to say "oh, wow, that's a problem." But if a writer is having doubts b/c of the lack of dialogue, it tells me the writer is already questioning the scene, realizing that something is missing, something isn't working, and in twelve years of critiquing and studying this stuff, the answer is virtually always found in asking -- where's your antagonist?

So, while there are exceptions, in both theory and practice, those exceptions aren't very helpful to the person who thinks there's something wrong with the scene and is trying to figure out what it is. Which is why I perhaps exaggerate a little (although, personally, I hated Cast Away, didn't see A Perfect Storm, and wouldn't voluntarily read a book that wasn't, at its core, a struggle between two characters, and generally speaking the vast, vast, vast majority of novels have a protagonist and antagonist locked in a struggle). I may be wrong about a given scene (and I believe the OP mentioned more than one such scene, which really sends up a red flag for me), but the odds are in favor of the problem -- if there is one -- having to do with the lack of antagonist.

Just as a sort of footnote, b/c I don't think it's what you meant to attribute to me, but just to be clear, the second person in the scene doesn't need to be PHYSICALLY opposing the protagonist, in the sense of punching the protagonist or pointing a gun on the protagonist, but can be opposing the protagonist simply by sending a conversation in a certain direction. I think you meant I was saying that an antagonist needs to be physically present in the scene, and that I do believe is true, if not 100% of the time, at least very close to that.

JD

I knew someone who once was asked how he could read so fast. His reply: "I only read what's in quotes. That's where the real story takes place."

My unspoken reply: "That explains why you never have a clue what the book is about."

Long passages without dialogue are fine, as long as they work and aren't filled with narration spinning its wheels.

Sfecphory and Imelda, I agree with you. This is an interesting thread and the replies address one of my problems. I don't think that dialogue is always necessary to advance a story. I've read many good books with long scenes, even chapters, without dialogue. Even thrillers start with single-character scene. "Nightlife" by Thomas Perry comes to mind. A character has the right to be alone for some time -- true, there must be some physical activity not just sitting and thinking. Ms. Write mentioned that the respective scene is not of such kind.

I started my novel with a short-short chapter where the character is alone, he has to be alone. If I introduce another character it would be forced as well as the dialogue, like "you know, you have a show tonight" only to let the reader know what's about to happen a few hours later. There is some tension b/c something happens to him at that moment. It also sets the setting and why he is in that particular setting. The bottom line is, the scene must be interesting, allowing the author to play his/her own style, rhythm, sentences length, etc.

Scenes

There's nothing at all wrong with scenes that have no dialogue and no other characters. If read some very good, and fairly long short stories, that have neither dialogue nor others characters. They're fairly common. And I've certainly read many very long scenes in novels that have neither. If you avoid too much navel gazing, such scenes can be very powerful.