I love to “talk shop” with other writers. I learn so much
about my own process and my weaknesses because it’s always easier to see the
flaws – and the strengths! – in someone else’s work. Recently, I had the mirrored
experience of serving as a beta reader for another writer’s novel and receiving
similar feedback on one of my own. The thematic similarities and differences between
the two very early versions of the stories are irrelevant. What fascinated me
was that we used dialog in diametrically opposed ways in our story construction:
my friend’s rough draft read like a screenplay, and mine had comparatively
little conversation. We’ll both end up with balanced manuscripts, but we’ve
started from opposite places.
Dialog, which is the transcription of what each character
says, rather than a summary in narrative, is one of a writer’s most powerful
tools. It’s also one that’s easy to abuse, either by using it too much or too
little, or asking it to perform functions in the story that it’s not
well-suited for. Certainly, it’s possible to tell a story entirely in dialog
form, just as it’s possible to write a story entirely in narrative with zero
dialog. Most stories fall in the comfortable middle zone, especially if they
involve more than one character capable of speech.
When we write prose stories, we can choose to show action in
a variety of ways, narrative being one, dialog another. Dialog isn’t very good
for showing events at a distance; characters can be discussing those events or
relaying them, but both are “off the scene” and hence have less immediacy. On
the other hand, if the emphasis is on the reaction of the characters to those
events, dialog can be of immense help. One of the strengths of dialog is that
if skillfully handled, it can give us a window into a character’s inner state
without being in that character’s head. Screenplay writers know this and use
dialog to reveal character, to heighten and resolve tension, to create
conflict, and to further the plot.
Which brings me to one of the things I saw in my friend’s
manuscript. She came to her story with “screenwriter’s mind.” She used dialog
not only to convey the content of conversations (relationship building,
changing, exchange of information between characters, etc.) but to sketch out
the action that she would later fill in with narrative. I’m a bit in awe of
this since what little I know of screenplay writing has thoroughly impressed me
with what a high-wire act it is to use only dialog and highly abbreviated
descriptions of scene and action to tell a story.
