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1st person story with no dialogue? [closed]

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Closed by System‭ on Dec 31, 2016 at 17:52

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Is it possible to write a good story without any dialogue? I'm working on a short story, and trying to keep it within 2000 words, but preferably 1000-1500 words.

I'm trying to write it as if the narrator is writing a manifesto/memoir stating his life experience, and his organizations purpose.

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This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/25731. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Yes, of course it is. What you are describing is merely a story in which nobody speaks. Since it is perfectly possible to have a story in which a character is alone the entire time, why would it be a problem that there is no dialog?

Dialog is just the recording of a particular action: speech. You might as well ask if you can write a good story in which nobody eats or sleeps or fights or makes love or falls out of a tree.

If a story has story shape and is well told on a serious theme, it will be a good story, regardless of which actions characters take in the course of it. (Serious here does not mean not funny. It means takes the depiction of the human condition seriously, which can sometimes be very funny.)

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