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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31117
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31117
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The great privilege of the novelist is that you can choose what sources of interest you create in your novel. Novels today tend to be dialogue heavy, partly in response to "Show don't Tell" and partly because the writer and the reader probably watch more TV than they read novels. But that does not mean that you have to make dialogue the primary source of interest in your novel. That is up to you. You may just have to cast your net a little wider to find good exemplars.

Nonetheless, your premise is flawed. You are equating illiteracy with an unsophisticated use of language. But that is a misnomer. Literacy has to do with the written word. Lack of the written word had nothing to do with your level of sophistication in the use of the spoken word. True, the ability to read does expose you to a wider world, but it does not mean that intelligent people who have not learned to read, particularly in a culture that has no written culture, cannot think sophisticated thoughts and express sophisticated ideas. We have plenty of evidence of sophistication from preliterate societies both in the form or art and in the form of language handed down in the oral tradition.

The preservation and transmission of language in an oral tradition depends on different methods. We probably would not have poetry if it were not for the need to preserve and pass on core stories from one generation to the next. Perhaps we would not have music, or at least song, either.

So, if you want to make your non-literate society interesting, think more about how the transmission of stories and ideas works in a non-literate culture. You might find it pretty interesting.

**EDIT:** If your characters are simply stupid, on the other hand, you face a more fundamental challenge. Stories are built around aspiration and endeavour. At their heart is a choice between conflicting values. The protagonist wants something, and, as the story progresses, they meet increasing levels of resistance to the achievement of their desire until at last they must make a fundamental choice, pay a significant price, by giving up one value to achieve another.

But such choices require the ability to foresee the consequences of actions. Without such ability, people blunder from one immediate response to another, usually to their doom. Stories are about making difficult choices and choices are only difficult when the person making them has a sophisticated appreciation for the consequences of their actions. (One could argue that this is the original purpose of stories, to teach humans to anticipate and weigh the consequences of their actions.)

If your characters are all stupid, too stupid to put together a few coherent sentences, it is hard to imagine them having the capability to anticipate the consequences of their actions, and thus hard to build a hero's arc for any of them. There is perhaps some way to build a satire out of such a situation (think _Idiocracy_ for example) but it is hard to see how you do a hero's journey. And if you can't do that, that is going to do far more to make your story dull than the simplistic use of language.

Original score: 9