Stories without characters or dialogue

AOD23 · Dec 16, 2007

Well, since I finally found my way back here and had this question bothering me for a few days now, figured I'd ask it.

I recently wrote a short story without any intention of this happening or such but...it's got no characters in or dialogue of any sort. It's not something I've personally ever seen before, so was wondering if such had ever been published before?

I don't actually intend to attempt to get this particular story published...but after thinking about it for some time, the concept of such a thing made me curious enough to have to ask.

Shweta · Dec 16, 2007

What do you mean by "no characters"? It's all scenery?

AOD23 · Dec 16, 2007

No, I mean it's just telling a story but it's not focusing in on any specific characters. Liike it's spanning a few months time and there's no named character in it, there's mass characters in it yes, but none are focused in on enough to be more than background.

It's kind of hard to explain but it's just a story told by the narrator that's more like a detailing of events, but saying that it's not focused in on any one person in particular is I guess the best way I can say it.

I'm just wondering if anything like that has been seen in published mediums of any sort before.

CheshireCat · Dec 16, 2007

Honestly meaning no offense, it sounds like a lot of unpublished work I've seen. Narrative without a POV. Or, usually, a story.

Sorry.

maxmordon · Dec 16, 2007

One Hundred Years of Solute by Gabriel García Márquez centers on a village, but more specifically on the Buendía family

KTC · Dec 18, 2007

The reader needs to lock into something. From what you describe...that something isn't here.

Susan Breen · Dec 18, 2007

How long is it? Sometimes I'll be pulled in by three or four pages of interesting writing, even if it's not following a traditional arc, but if I have to read twenty pages, I begin to drift. I have seen stories without characters or dialogue, but then the writing has to be incredible.

Bartholomew · Dec 19, 2007

If you can read Spanish, find some Gabriel García Márquez stories and read them. They manage to be fascinating without having the typical conventions we associate with characters and POV.

If you can't read Spanish, I recommend finding some English translations of his work. He was a master of the style you're talking about.

I highly recommend "Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes," which is one of his short stories. I know that a very good translation of this story exists, but I can't recall who the translator was at the moment.

Shadow_Ferret · Dec 19, 2007

So what is it like? God just looking out at a crowd? How do you identify the people? "The man in the green jacket jostled the woman with the black bonnet who bumped into a little boy carrying a large french loaf."

Personally, I like characters. I like someone to identify with when I read.

Aramis · Dec 19, 2007

Shadow_Ferret said:
So what is it like? God just looking out at a crowd? How do you identify the people? "The man in the green jacket jostled the woman with the black bonnet who bumped into a little boy carrying a large french loaf."

Personally, I like characters. I like someone to identify with when I read.

Me too. My problem is writing in too much dialogue.

NicoleMD · Dec 19, 2007

I wrote a short story from a prompt once that was to show a couple having an arguement but you couldn't mention the couple or the argument, or something like that. It was a fun exercise, and I mostly alluded to their reactions by the physical world around them -- doors slamming, tears on pillows, that sort of thing. I liked it but no one in my writer's group "got it."

I'll post it in SYW later today.

Nicole

OverTheHills&FarAway · Dec 19, 2007

This concept has the potential to be awesome. I'm going to have to try it sometime...

HeronW · Dec 19, 2007

If there's no characters or dialogue, where's the conflict and the drama? Seems like without that you'd have an essay, speech, a dry history...

DancingMaenid · Dec 19, 2007

HeronW said:
If there's no characters or dialogue, where's the conflict and the drama? Seems like without that you'd have an essay, speech, a dry history...

That's what I'm wondering. Even if the story doesn't get really personal with any characters, I'd think that it would help to have people directing what happens. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the concept, because when I hear "no characters" I think no people in the story, whatsoever. I can see someone having some effective prose about a storm, for example, but I think it would be very difficult to make that a full-fledged story, and even harder to make a longer story out of it. Even in stories about animals, the animals are generally given some sort of human quality for the reader to latch onto.

I'm not saying that it can't work, and I'm sure that in the right hands, it could be good (though maybe not my tastes, but that doesn't negate quality), but I think that a story with no characters would often be more along the lines of prose than a story in the sense of plot.

OverTheHills&FarAway · Dec 19, 2007

Look.

It's obvious that a story about nothing is not a story.

I think what the OP is suggesting involves something a bit more complicated, something more focused on...something less tangible than characters with names speaking things the author puts in quotes.

A story with no characters does not necessarily mean no people. Characters are a manifestation, a personification of emotion and feeling, a vehicle to portray them. It's possible, in my mind, to suggest emotion and feeling without characters. Focusing on something else.

It'd be incredibly hard to do, don't get me wrong. But not impossible. An interesting idea, and one I plan on trying.

Will Lavender · Dec 19, 2007

Sean Allan Greer -- who became pretty well-known a couple of years ago for the novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli -- ends his story collection How it Was for Me with a wonderful story about a youth soccer game. There are focal characters, but the story essentially just rotates around the game, focusing on the crowd, on the mothers and fathers, on the players, and on a few children who play in a wooded area beside the field. I just remember being bowled over by it.

There's also a lot of experimental literature without main characters. I mentioned this one the other day, but it's a goodie: Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String.

Danger Jane · Dec 19, 2007

OverTheHills&FarAway said:
Look.

It's obvious that a story about nothing is not a story.

I think what the OP is suggesting involves something a bit more complicated, something more focused on...something less tangible than characters with names speaking things the author puts in quotes.

A story with no characters does not necessarily mean no people. Characters are a manifestation, a personification of emotion and feeling, a vehicle to portray them. It's possible, in my mind, to suggest emotion and feeling without characters. Focusing on something else.

It'd be incredibly hard to do, don't get me wrong. But not impossible. An interesting idea, and one I plan on trying.

I totally agree. Stories do not require characters, in theory. They require something that grabs the reader's attention and holds it. Generally, that's either a compelling character or a compelling plot, and conflict. But in theory, anything fictional--not an essay--and compelling, is a story. It's just veeery, very hard to achieve this and not end up with a couple thousand words of elegant description, or abstract idealism.

NicoleMD · Dec 19, 2007

Here's my story, as promised. It doesn't explicitly have characters. I don't know if it holds attention either, but I guess that's to be determined.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1898307#post1898307

Nicole

Danger Jane · Dec 19, 2007

Thanks for posting that, Nicole. Your story is a really good example.

Dustry Joe · Dec 23, 2007

This can be done. (Illustrating that all the concepts of writing are only as good as the next thing you read)

Having no characters or dialog does not mean "there's no story"...expand your horizons. You can have a story without conflict, too. How much dramatic conflict is there in "The Lottery" that everybody has to read in school.

Ray Bradbury (a good example of a great writer being able to do whatever he wants and pull it off) had a story in the Martian Chronicles (I believe) it was about a house sitting there unoccupied, preparing meals and clearing them away uneaten, etc. The people who lived in the house were all dead in a nuclear holocaust of undetermined scope or history.

So anybody really hard pressed to defend the Order Of Things could say "The house is the character". Ok, sure.

But there is no living thing in the story, no dialog, no conflict, no dramatic tension. It's a moving story and people read it and like it in spite of the convictions we see expressed that a story can't be a story if it doesn't pass the lit teacher checklist.

Dawnstorm · Dec 23, 2007

Hi,

I may have time later to read your story (skimmed it), but I can think of a couple of examples off the top of my head:

1. Most famous, perhaps: Virginia Woolf: "Kew Gardens": It's basically about a botanical garden. People walk past flowers, and a snail decides whether to crawl over or under an obstructing leaf. If there's anything approaching a character, it's the snail, but its story isn't exciting and doesn't carry the piece. The people (who are talking, so there is dialogues) are characters, but not really in this story. You get fragments that tell you little to nothing.

2. William Gibson, "Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City": If I remember that one right, it's just a setting description. Living conditions of people are described in the abscence of the people, merely by what artefacts they leave behind. (This may be closer to what you've got, but it's less coherent and more "episodic", if you can apply the word to a text where nothing at all is happening.)

3. Jack Deighton: "This Is the Road": A couple of people are queuing up to be taken off a planet in rockets. The story is narrated in 1st person plural (We do this. We do that.) It starts off with a "rogue", who vanishes on the first page never to be seen again. This tells us early on: look, here's someone interesting. This is not his story, though.

I enjoyed reading all those stories. I must have read more, but these are the ones I can think of.

shriek · Dec 23, 2007

Ray Bradbury (a good example of a great writer being able to do whatever he wants and pull it off) had a story in the Martian Chronicles (I believe) it was about a house sitting there unoccupied, preparing meals and clearing them away uneaten, etc. The people who lived in the house were all dead in a nuclear holocaust of undetermined scope or history.

There Will Come Soft Rains
And it's brilliant. So yes, absolutely, you can do it. But I think it's like any of the trickier, less-standard techniques. You can do it, but you have to do it really well for it to work.

virtue_summer · Dec 23, 2007

I'd argue that the Bradbury story does make the house a character. It gives it humanoid characteristics by referring to it quivering at sounds, having a "preoccupation with self-protection" and even gives the house dialogue in this sentence: "how carefully it had inquired, 'Who goes there? What's the password?'" The story has action as the mechanized house does what it's programmed to, and conflict when a fire starts and the house is referred to as trying to save itself. There is a difference in the state of the house at the beginning and that at the end. Though unique and brilliant in its approach, it still contains most of the elements associated with story.

CheshireCat · Dec 23, 2007

You guys have way too much time on your hands.

aguywhotypes · Oct 3, 2015

If you have no characters you then have no people.
What you have is:
animals, bugs, rodents, fish, etc
and plant life, sea life
and weather

That is all I can think of ...
Wow, how freaky would this be. T

here is the what if question.
What if there are no humans on earth?

Stories without characters or dialogue

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