Doing walls of text dialogue right
Shakespeare did it, he did it quite a lot of times, but there are a few problems with it:
- He was a screenwriter in an age, where we couldn't afford building enough sets (or cities that don't catch on fire), so dumping info in dialogue was
easiernot financially impossible. - He's sorta "outdated" (the writing, not his corpse).
- I have to share the scarce resources of this planet with people who thought that it'd be a good idea to place Romeo and Juliet into a modern era.
However, I'd like to give the story some depth with uninterrupted chit-chats, like Graham McNeil.
Example:
[Protagonist]: Ya' know, it's kinda hard to believe that you're doing this for the greater good when your special snowflake sword is literally made out of slaughtered toddlers. But why would you even need it? Order can be maintained with a regular drone army and a few operators.
[A.I sidekick]: Who are unwitting orphans...
[Protagonist]: At least I take a good care of them!
[A.I sidekick]: Sure, they are valuable tools.
[Protagonist]: That's not even...
[Antagonist]: You're calling me a mass murderer!? Have you forgotten, when you turned an entire race into unstoppable robots, who only knew and desired nothing else than destruction?
[Protagonist]: That wasn't intentional, you shittalking corpse!
[Antagonist]: Not to mention the other mass murderer you made, the Anathema. Your race had the opportunity to prove themselves as the defenders of order, and they instead caused the war that left its mark in the universe for the rest of eternity.
[Protagonist]: Most of those were Enlil's fault, and he was way too scary looking for everyone else to doubt him. As for Big E., he didn't take his sweet little time going on a treasure hunt, and instead, immediately started to bring back the "order" you adore so much. He ended up as a glorified skeleton, but that was Horus' fault. Admit it, you just want power, you want to take power, like stealing daddy's gun and pretending to be the strong kid while you don't even know how to reload. This is why you've failed.
[Antagonist]: Don' think it's over yet, let us see how much your words worth against steel!
[Protagonist]: I'd rather prefer my pen against that.
So, I can't really chop this dialog apart, as it's nothing else than a battle of wits. So, if there's any, what are the things I can do to make this more readable?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/30426. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
+1 Thomo. To expand, IRL two people do not stand still and stare at each other and spout dialog while only moving their mouths. Even if they are on the phone! They are doing something, thinking something, wondering, realizing, pausing for some good reason to collect their thoughts or feel some emotion or try to understand a puzzle. The have senses, they hear their environment, they sense temperature and breezes and sun revealed by clouds moving on. They sense incongruities. They are not ready with a memorized answer, after a question imparts new information or a surprise.
Such statements require thinking, thinking requires recall of similar situations, they are reminded of scenes and imagery that relate. That translates into what they say next.
Why the second line "Who are unwitting orphans"? Who was the speaker thinking of? How does he know? Why was he disgusted by the thought? Can you give us some imagery of what he was thinking before he answers so glibly?
In the spirit of help, I would tell a student that a dialogue like the OP offers should be at least three times longer. It is not yet fully imagined, or the author left out too much of what they did imagine. The result is timing that is too rapid, making it feel phony and rehearsed.
Consider a movie and the actors in it. They have memorized the script, they both could just exchange lines as quickly as possible and finish the scene in one minute instead of ten. But they take ten! This dialogue feels like they did the one minute version of a ten minute scene.
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