How to avoid pages of dialogue?
I'm starting my story with my protagonist found (by the police), bleeding at a crime scene. When he wakes up, he has no recollection i.e. he's lost his memory. He's interrogated by two Inspectors, but as he doesn't remember anything, it's mostly a one-sided conversation with the Inspectors essentially describing the crime scene.
My Question: How can I avoid such long 'walls' of one-sided dialogue and make the description more interesting for the reader?
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How can I avoid such long 'walls' of one-sided dialogue...
You don't need to. My writing style is naturally very conversational, especially in my more "slice-of-life"-esque stories: characters will sit/stand around talking to each other for pages at a time. One of them has a character deliver an expository infodump that goes on for about three pages.
There are two tricks I use to avoid these becoming boring:
- You've said that the protagonist doesn't talk much in that scene, but that doesn't mean he has to just sit there being talked to. Have him react to the situation - if not verbally, then physically or internally. Have him react to what they say, and what they ask. If they refuse to believe that he really doesn't remember anything, have him grow frustrated. Have him worry about his injuries and his memory loss, and wonder how they happened. Is he in pain? Have him press his morphine button - unless the interrogators are particularly sadistic and take it away from him.
- Make sure that what's being said is actually interesting. Your characters are real people with real personalities, whom your readers have never met before. Introduce them. Make sure their personalities come across in that opening scene. Are the cops grizzled and hard-boiled? Are they sympathetic towards the protagonist? How do they react to his claims of amnesia? How well do they get along with each other? Maybe one believes him and one doesn't? Your characters should reveal as much about themselves in that opening scene as they should about the protagonist's situation.
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Add setting, emotions, hesitations, frustrations, and interruptions and questions.
To me (and IMO) a wall of dialogue is typically an under-imagined scene, and it needs to be longer.
What is your character seeing of the setting?
What about in the detectives?
What does he disagree with?
Why is he so passively listening to this stuff, why isn't he interrupting and interrogating his interrogators?
Why aren't they getting frustrated and angry with him, and telling him to quit asking questions?
Why doesn't he have any difficulty imagining what they claim?
Why doesn't he fear being a suspect in some heinous crime?
Why does he trust these detectives?
Do they ever gesture? Get up? Sit down? Shift? Or are they all just disembodied talking heads?
What does their body language tell the MC?
Walls of dialogue, like every other scene in your book, need a healthy dose of conflict to remain interesting. In conversation, conflict is generally verbal and emotionally expressive, to convey disagreement, grief, confusion, withdrawal, hurt, anger, humor, sarcasm.
Even in this, you want to Show, not Tell. Telling is reciting facts, Showing is describing a character's reaction to facts, the consequence of learning this new information, how it affects them.
Remember your job, as an author, is to assist the imagination of the reader and keep it as close to what you imagine as you reasonably can. You can't assist them if you have not fully imagined this scene yourself! Your job is not to just convey "information" about the setting, you must give the reader the experience of waking up disoriented in a hospital room not knowing WTF happened, and then being interrogated by police officers that are guarded and may think you are a criminal or killer, so whether they are hostile or not they feel hostile to you.
Imagine your scene and your characters better. This will break up the dialogue, it may even triple the length of the scene, but readers don't care about that! As long as you keep feeding them morsels of conflict and feelings, of thrust and parry in this conversation, they will keep reading.
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Depending on your narrator you could for example have the protagonist react to the questions with inner monologue instead of external dialogue. If the inspectors ask him "What's your name?" he could start to think "That's a good question. I have no idea. But will they believe me? I probably wouldn't believe myself. Was it something with a 'J'? Or a 'G'?". You could also have the inspectors ask him again if he hasn't responded for some time.
This allows you to switch between the external dialogue and inner monologue to make the scene more varied. The inner monologue could also be used to simply analyze his surroundings or to think about the last few hours he can remember.
If you are writing from the perspective of one of the inspector's you could do a similar thing by having him analyze your protagonists facial expressions, posture, gestures, clothes... to find clues that would help him find out what is going on and whether the protagonist is telling the truth.
If you narrator is omniscient you could explain some things from all of the peoples perspectives and add a few remarks or hints about things they may not know yet - or not anymore.
In any case you should think about what the people are doing. A dialogue,e specially an interrogation, is not a sterile environment where nothing happens and a few puppets are talking to each other. There are people, emotions, reactions - things that can be seen and that can be analyzed. To avoid long walls of one-sided dialogue try to embrace the silence.
Embracing the silence is extremely difficult for many people - which is why it's important in dialogue to know when to give the other one room. Your inspectors will not constantly bombard your protagonist - they will ask him a question and then wait. And if nothing happens they will ask again. Perhaps not so nice anymore. And they will circle back to a topic after making a bit of smalltalk. They know when to wait for the reply and they have the required patience - they have aaaaaaaaaaaaall day for this. And this silence can be filled with descriptions of the people, the room, their thoughts, their memories, ...
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