Infrequent dialogue?

ShannonC_77 · Apr 1, 2007

So I'm just starting to work on my newest attempt at a novel

and largely the plot I have planned out is mostly one character and her internal battles - at least the first part anyway, later on I plan to introduce another character who will eventually become her partner

-and on a side note, is it okay to introduce him halfway through or is that always a bad thing?

My main question though is right now I'm writing and it feels like it's me just talking about her actions a lot since there isn't a lot of back and forth conversation going on between her and other characters. Is this a big issue? I'm using some internal dialogue of her thoughts about things around her but I'm not sure if that is enough.

I'm working on trying to solve the showing not telling problem and I think it's getting slightly better but part of me wonders if it really is if I've got no dialogue going (there is some dialoge but I'll go a page or two here and there where there isn't).

How else could I set this up so it wasn't an issue?

Shady Lane · Apr 1, 2007

Hmmm...I'm sort of conflicted. I think this could work really really well for a very talented writer--and I'm not saying you're not, but I'd have to be pretty damn confident to try to pull this off. If you think you can do it, then I say full speed ahead.

But I think it could very easily get boring pretty quickly. And, if the reader doesn't like your main character--and most good main characters have some qualities that rub some people the wrong way--he's going to be stuck with just your MC for a long, long time, and that could piss him off.

It's a risk.

Novelust · Apr 1, 2007

I don't think it'd be an issue if the story is moving forward - the one big problem I've noticed with a lot of first person POV is that authors have a tendency to stop and navel-gaze.

In other words, so long as 'no dialogue' doesn't mean 'no conflict' or 'no plot' - you're probably fine.

job · Apr 1, 2007

ShannonC_77 said:
My main question though is right now I'm writing and it feels like it's me just talking about her actions a lot since there isn't a lot of back and forth conversation going on between her and other characters. Is this a big issue? I'm using some internal dialogue of her thoughts about things around her but I'm not sure if that is enough.

Would you enjoy reading this sort of book?

Are there books plotted like this on your 'keeper' shelf?

CheshireCat · Apr 1, 2007

If even half your plot is the internal "battles" of a single character, you've most likely got a problem.

Most stories need external tension and conflict, IMO. And characters should interact with each other, which includes plenty of dialogue (without going to the other extreme, which is "talking heads" for pages and pages without action).

Any way to have external factors reflecting/causing her internal battles?

Is it first-person, or third? (Just curious.)

maestrowork · Apr 1, 2007

Without reading your work I can't really say. But I agree that a lot of 1st person "internal struggle" story tends to be very claustrophobic -- and what novelust said: navel-gazing. Unless you have a really interesting and fascinating voice and insight, after a while, internal monologue and "telling" (I did this, and I did that, and now I feel this and I feel that) stops the plot and becomes very boring. I once started reading a book mostly in 1st person monologue (almost no dialogue) and I stopped reading soon enough.

It's not to say it won't work. Again, without knowing your work, I can't tell. But you have a lot of hurdles ahead of you. There are things to watch for when you're doing this kind of deeply emotional, introspective 1st person stories. A great story needs external events/conflicts/interactions/etc. to come to life. I mean, would you like to be stuck in someone's mind for a day with nothing else going on? I wouldn't. So keep that in mind when you write your story.

LiteraryAspirations · Apr 1, 2007

The best stories I've read use some sort of external conflict to really highlight the internal conflict. Is there someway to use the internal conflict as a catalyst for an external conflict to help keep the reader hooked?

lfraser · Apr 1, 2007

A few days ago I abandoned a book because there was so little dialogue (and there was really almost none). The main character spent much of the first 1o0 pages of the story by himself, and I couldn't warm up to the character even though he was doing ostensibly interesting things and was up against a Big Mystery. I found myself not really caring about him, and put the book in the library donations pile.

PeeDee · Apr 1, 2007

I had a very long section in one of the robot series episodes I did where there was no dialog. There was no option for dialog, no way to insert it, unless I wanted him talking to himself (which I didn't.)

Now, I'm not immediately comfortable with this myself, in that I know dialog is stronger than just straight prose. At least for me. But since there was no way around it, I really loosened my prose until it was nearly conversational. not quite chatty, because that would convey the wrong tone, but I let it relax until it was talking to the readers. It could go on tangents as the character thought about things, it could talk to the reader, rather than telling a story.

It worked well. It flowed smoothly, it got what was needed done, and then I went happily back into the next scene with the dialog available.

...

I've read books with long sections that have no dialog. The trick is to, no matter how you do it, keep it interesting for the reader. Terry Pratchett is excellent at this, in that his prose adopts the general sound of whatever character he's following, and so the prose reads as comfortably as the dialog, because they aren't that far apart.

Raphee · Apr 1, 2007

There are stories that need dialog and then there are others that can survive without them or need less of them. Depends on plot, characters, and voice.

The one thing that makes a book boring is not the lack of dialog but the lack of a story; the lack of forward movement and too much navel gazing.
Dialogs are a tool for the novel. Use yours as much as you need and decide on your own inner feeling, at least for the first write.
But do avoid internal struggles, that as you mentioned take up so much of your book.

Joe270 · Apr 2, 2007

This is a tough sell, if you ask me, and I suppose in an off way, you did.

If you can package this story in a way that moves the story forward, it could work. This is a tough nut.

The Milagro Bean Field War was a successful play on Melville's Moby Dick where it took for-freakin' ever to get to the short story at the end of the novel. Millions loved it. But those are the only two like that that I can dredge to mind. Plus, they used individual character stories to move the tale forward, almost mini-short stories along the way. (Still, Moby Dick was a horrible read. I have never put down a book I started, but that one was tough to finish, and I'm a sailor.)

Do you want to devote so much work for such a hard sell?

McDuff · Apr 2, 2007

There is, in my opinion, only one rule in novel writing:

Tell the story the best way you possibly can.

If your internal monologuing, description and the introduction of a character halfway through are, in your opinion, the best way to tell the story, then by all means go for it. You may be wrong, but probably the only way to find out is to sit down and write it. If, about halfway through, you find yourself saying "ok, this is self-indulgent bollocks", then throw it out and try and find out how else you can tell the story.

One book I can think of that seems to be in the same ballpark of what you're describing is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It also, I must mention, went on to considerable success. There's also one of my favourite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Both these books had specific stories which were best told in the styles they used. If your book is the same, and you're telling the story in a compelling way that you yourself would want to read, then why not?

(on "navel gazing", there was one book I read a few years back that was about 80K words on a single conversation in a cafe, with footnotes everywhere and long digressions on descriptions of salt shakers and tablecloths and the like. It was fascinating for not going anywhere, because of the quality of the writing, but I cannot for the life of me remember either the title or the author, so I am afraid this is singularly unhelpful unless someone with a better memory than me has also read this.)

Joe270 · Apr 2, 2007

Another internal monologue story I recall from my horrible memory is P.S. Your Cat is Dead. This was a bizare coming out of the closet piece from the early eighties, not my cup of tea, as the jerks in the "First Chapters" contest like to say. I think the catch for me was the main character lost his manuscript to a robbery. Man, that catches a writer's attention.

Never the less, it was an interesting and compelling story. I doubt anyone remembers it, however. I doubt it sold well. There's the rub, you need to sell it to people en masse.

DVGuru · Apr 2, 2007

I just finished reading I Am Legend by Richard Matheson and there was barely any dialogue in it until the end. A huge aspect of the book is the main characters struggle with being the last human on earth. It's closer to a novella than novel, but could give you an example of a story with almost no dialogue.

PeeDee · Apr 2, 2007

In all the millions of words that H.P. Lovecraft wrote, the dialog count is extremely tiny. Less then five thousand words of dialog, I recall. And people still gobble up his stuff.

(though I wouldn't call him an example of engaging and flowing prose. Here, I think it's a case of ideas that shine through everything that's working against them.)

NeuroFizz · Apr 2, 2007

One way to get around the single character situation is to have triggers for the internalized slicing and dicing. Just a pile of internal musings would be difficult to pull off, but if there were extrenal stimuli that trigger the internal reactions, set up the conflicts, get the character to react, it may be easier to keep the reader turning pages. At the same time, these extrenal triggers can bring out characterization through the various reactions.

Bufty · Apr 2, 2007

Just read some of your earlier posts, Shannon, and I'm not sure what you mean by your 'newest attempt', but dialogue brings characters to life.

Leave out dialogue and what you have left had better be brilliant. Nothing but internal musings can be boring. Turn your main character's comfortable daily routine upside-down quickly and let's see how she (or he) reacts.

McDuff · Apr 2, 2007

I am assuming that, if there are other people in the universe, the reason for no dialogue in the text would be that we're seeing the world through the fog of the character's internalised perceptions. As such, it's not as if there would be no plot or external stimuli.

If the story was just going to be one character sitting and musing without really doing anything at all, well, anything can work, but you'll have to be a really good writer to pull that kind of thing off.

ShannonC_77 · Apr 2, 2007

Thanks so much for all the replies, there's a lot to think about.

The general premise of the story (I'm shooting for a chick lit genre) is a woman whose husband has cheated on her, she's been 'eating herself better' and then decides it's time to start getting her life back on track. I'm going to take her through a serious of popular diets and exercise programs and in a humorous way (hopefully) tell what she experiences on each one.

I'm only at about 25 pages so it's not too far yet - maybe too soon to even worry about the lack of dialogue. There has been some but I guess at points I just feel like she's at home a lot researching on the diet, looking at herself in the mirror (I'm detailing the thoughts running through her head), going grocery shopping to prepare for this first diet and so on (those are the basic scenese I have at the moment).

I'm thinking I may try and find a way to introduce another major character soon instead since that would definitely get more dialogue in there. Normally, is there any general 'rule' for how many pages you could go without dialogue? (say would 3 typed pages be far too many?). I know once I get further along there will be more talking it's just at this point she's doing a lot of solo things - researching, planning and so on.

I'm working with one person right now whose reading it so I'll see what she says as well since she'll see the story and then maybe also post it in the 'share your work' section once I've worked on it a bit more.

Thanks again.

JanDarby · Apr 2, 2007

I'm a very strong proponent of the "gotta have external conflict in every single scene" theory (ideally the external is a physical manifestation of the internal), so take this for what it's worth: You need a second person on the page right away.

Stories are characters in conflict. Each unit of the story is a unit of conflict, down to scenes and action/reaction units within the scenes.

Conflict is not necessarily things exploding and fistfights or even arguments, just two characters opposing each other in some way, possibly even for perfectly good reasons.

So, look at the protagonist's goals. She wants to lose weight. (You might also get into why, the motivation, but that's a rant for another day.) Okay, now who's preventing her from doing that? No one; she's doing it, or at least trying to, with nothing really stopping her, at least nothing she can't control (e.g., "eat less, move more"). Which means no conflict, no story.

Now, switch it around a little: she wants to lose weight, and her best friend is sabotaging that weight loss. Protagonist and antagonist (the best friend) get together, and protag says, "I just started this great diet, and I went to the store and stocked up on cabbage and diet soda, b/c that's all that's allowed on this diet." And the antagonist gasps, and says, "oh, my dear, you look lovely just the way you are, and don't you know that diet soda leaches the calcium from your bones, and you'll be in a wheelchair by the end of the month, and I can't bear to see that, so here, eat some cheesecake." Although it'll get dragged out a lot longer than that. So, the protagonist goes to the gym, b/c she's going to get thin through exercise instead of dieting, and it turns out the gym is owned by her friend's brother, and on behalf of his sister, he refuses to let her join the gym.

Or whatever. That's not your story, I'm sure. But see if you can take the elements you've got and restructure them a bit to include conflict -- protagonist wants to do this diet/exercise/program and someone is stopping her from doing it, and she will change by the end of the book as a result of all this struggle.

You can still use what you've got, but perhaps have her telling someone what a disaster Diet X was, rather than simply showing the disaster of Diet X, which has got to be a bit dull.

You can present the humor in her way of telling someone else about it. In fact, something I see a lot is that newer writers are afraid to have their characters say things out loud that real people, with our inhibitions, might not say. But in fiction, especially in the chick-litty voice, the characters DO say these things out loud. So, the snarky things she's thinking -- make her speak them out loud to someone. It's funnier and it provides more opportunity for conflict. It also provides more opportunity for bonding, if you've got a romance subplot going on. Or even a friendship. People LIKE (and ultimately fall in love with) other people, because of their sense of humor and opinions, and if those are never shared with the other person in the scene, it's hard to see why the two people are friends or lovers, beyond the superficial.

JD

maestrowork · Apr 2, 2007

There really are no rules or guidelines. It either works or it doesn't. I think you should just write it. Then you can ask your beta readers. I think that's a better approach than trying to second guess.

I tend to use external conflicts interactions to bring out internal conflicts. In my first chapter, I have the MC driving madly to see his girlfriend, just to talk to her. But he's really thinking of someone else and he has all these questions in his mind. The scene plays out as a back-and-forth between these two characters but it really draws out the internal conflict the MC is experiencing.

Jamesaritchie · Apr 2, 2007

Dialogue

Lack of dialogue is not a problem in and of itself. But too much introspection can be a problem, dialogue or no. Introspection has its place, and can be important, but unless there's plenty of external story, it's difficult to carry this out in a long work.

Even internal struggles matter only in context with the external world.

herdon · Apr 2, 2007

As others have said, I think it is definately something that could work, but it would take a very gifted writer to pull off effectively.

ShannonC_77 · Apr 2, 2007

Thanks again for the posts. I worked on it again today and tried to think of a way to bring in another character. I think I'm going to have her mother playing a larger role so that will have more dialogue in the beginning.

JanDarby said:
I'm a very strong proponent of the "gotta have external conflict in every single scene" theory (ideally the external is a physical manifestation of the internal), so take this for what it's worth: You need a second person on the page right away.

Stories are characters in conflict. Each unit of the story is a unit of conflict, down to scenes and action/reaction units within the scenes.

Conflict is not necessarily things exploding and fistfights or even arguments, just two characters opposing each other in some way, possibly even for perfectly good reasons.

So, look at the protagonist's goals. She wants to lose weight. (You might also get into why, the motivation, but that's a rant for another day.) Okay, now who's preventing her from doing that? No one; she's doing it, or at least trying to, with nothing really stopping her, at least nothing she can't control (e.g., "eat less, move more"). Which means no conflict, no story.

Now, switch it around a little: she wants to lose weight, and her best friend is sabotaging that weight loss. Protagonist and antagonist (the best friend) get together, and protag says, "I just started this great diet, and I went to the store and stocked up on cabbage and diet soda, b/c that's all that's allowed on this diet." And the antagonist gasps, and says, "oh, my dear, you look lovely just the way you are, and don't you know that diet soda leaches the calcium from your bones, and you'll be in a wheelchair by the end of the month, and I can't bear to see that, so here, eat some cheesecake." Although it'll get dragged out a lot longer than that. So, the protagonist goes to the gym, b/c she's going to get thin through exercise instead of dieting, and it turns out the gym is owned by her friend's brother, and on behalf of his sister, he refuses to let her join the gym.

Or whatever. That's not your story, I'm sure. But see if you can take the elements you've got and restructure them a bit to include conflict -- protagonist wants to do this diet/exercise/program and someone is stopping her from doing it, and she will change by the end of the book as a result of all this struggle.

You can still use what you've got, but perhaps have her telling someone what a disaster Diet X was, rather than simply showing the disaster of Diet X, which has got to be a bit dull.

You can present the humor in her way of telling someone else about it. In fact, something I see a lot is that newer writers are afraid to have their characters say things out loud that real people, with our inhibitions, might not say. But in fiction, especially in the chick-litty voice, the characters DO say these things out loud. So, the snarky things she's thinking -- make her speak them out loud to someone. It's funnier and it provides more opportunity for conflict. It also provides more opportunity for bonding, if you've got a romance subplot going on. Or even a friendship. People LIKE (and ultimately fall in love with) other people, because of their sense of humor and opinions, and if those are never shared with the other person in the scene, it's hard to see why the two people are friends or lovers, beyond the superficial.

JD

These are some good points, the way I was going to view it, is the antagonist is more her own mind - one side of her wants to stick to the diet and 'be good' while the other part of her mind keeps telling her to indulge (one piece won't hurt, and so on). So then it's a battle between her wanting to lose weight and the instant gratification from food.

You are right though about having another character sabotaging her, and that was going to be the character I had planned to join more in the middle of the novle. Upon thinking about it today though I think I will introduce him right away here and get him into the action. It should help with the pace too, otherwise I have a feeling it'll seem like the novel is dragging.

IrishScribbler · Apr 3, 2007

I'm doing internal conflict in my WIP, and in order to keep it from being boring or MC-centric, I'm incorporating the reactions/relationships she has with others as a result of her inner conflict. For example, how has her relationship with her mother changed because of her suicide attempt?

Infrequent dialogue?

ShannonC_77

Shady Lane

my name is hannah

Novelust

*Does not molest books.

job

In the end, it's just you and the manuscript

CheshireCat

Mostly purring. Mostly.

maestrowork

Fear the Death Ray

LiteraryAspirations

lfraser

Bored and Frantic

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

Raphee

In debt to AW

Joe270

McDuff

Joe270

DVGuru

Plays too many video games

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

NeuroFizz

The grad students did it

Bufty

Where have the last ten years gone?

McDuff

ShannonC_77

JanDarby

maestrowork

Fear the Death Ray

Jamesaritchie

herdon

What's up?

ShannonC_77

IrishScribbler