How to avoid turning dialogue into Q&A session?

OK, I'm going to rephrase your question a little. Your problem is this: You have information to impart, which is (a) interesting and (b) important. However, the act of imparting that information is neither interesting nor important.

I hope that sounds about right to you. And I think you'll find this way of phrasing the problem also hints and some potential solutions.

Make the scene important

If you don't have a good reason why the scene of two people talking is important -- consider making one up. Examples off-hand:

• Your protagonist is trying impress the other character, and win their favor.
• Your protagonist hates the other character, and is just looking for a fight.
• The other character's story is a perfect echo of something that happened to your protagonist, so the protagonist has a bunch of internal reactions to almost every detail.

Make the scene interesting

A dull infodump can be livened up if the interaction between the characters is interesting, off-kilter, or fun. If the other character is memorable, it'll feel like a scene, not an interrogation.

• Think of the Oracle in The Matrix. She just tells Neo plot information -- but she has fantastic style and personality; so the scene is fun and memorable.

Spotlight the information, not the conversation

If the problem is that imparting the information is kind of dull, then... maybe we don't actually need that part? Like, at all?

Maybe you can skip the conversation -- and just show the reader what you had intended to tell.

You can change point-of-views, just for the story being told, and let the second character narrate that bit -- instead of a Q&A, you get a vivid, straightforward account.

You may even conclude that your book needs more POV characters. Or that you need to position your protagonist where they can see the important part, experience it for themselves, instead of just hearing about it from somebody else.

So: A lot of dialogue can be improved, not by dialogue techniques at all -- but simply by building your piece to avoid having long Q&A sessions being necessary :)

Hope this helps; all the best!

posted almost 6 years ago

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Standback‭

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DPT's and Rasdashan's answers offer good advice. I will just add that its important to remember that most conversations are Q&A sessions (essentially). When you talk with someone, you want to ask them something. Even when you just want to tell them something, you generally expect some sort of reply. In return, they ask or tell you something. That's the back and forth nature of conversations.

The only difference between an interrogation and a conversation is that only one person "asks" during an interrogation. To avoid that, you can try the techniques that DPT and Rasdashan suggest.

You can also try to make sure that one character doesn't have all the answers. So then, when they talk, you are forced to go back and forth, resulting in a more natural conversation. This will improve your story-line too, I think.

posted almost 6 years ago

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gagarwa‭

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Your characters are too nice.

You can also argue, disagree (politely, rudely, friendly-rudely). You can misunderstand. You can interrupt. You can complain and ask them to get to the point. You can have the speaker fail to remember something, say something false and then correct themselves, forget the point of what they were saying and fail to answer a question, or decide they don't want to tell the listener something after all.

The listener, instead of being restricted to questions, can do what real people do: What they heard reminds them of something else, and they talk about that. "I saw that almost that same thing in Chicago, it was funny as hell. These two guys ..." And off into a story. This approach is suitable for people traveling, with nothing to do but talk. In other words, make it longer.

I think the mistake you are making is that you are trying to turn an information dump into a conversation instead, but it is just a soliloquy information dump (or history dump) from ONE character, with a prop character that is only there to prompt the next long chunk of soliloquy.

The solution is to ditch the soliloquy altogether, or if it is necessary, make it longer so the conversation develops both characters.

Remember, the reason we avoid information dumps (in exposition or dialog) is they are taxing on the reader's memory. They ask the reader to memorize a lot of stuff, and that takes them out of the story and into doing their homework.

It is seldom important for the reader to understand all at once why your character is the way they are. You need to try and engineer your story and conversation so this kind of "backstory" is not told in a big block, but in a paragraph, and preferably as an explanation for some action or decision being taken right now. If the back story never influences any action or decision, then it probably isn't important. If it does, the time to reveal it depends on how unusual it is; the less unusual, the closer the reveal can be to the decision, and vice versa. For example, if you are turning down the shrimp because shrimp gave you food poisoning as a kid, you can do that at the point of the decision.

A real conversation is not an interrogation (as you know). Bob says something. That makes Charlie think of something to talk about. That makes Bob think of something to talk about, and the conversation meanders around.

The replies are often questions IRL, but these are usually backward looking, to clarify something said, or get more information on something mentioned or claimed, they are usually NOT forward looking to lead the speaker into something entirely new.

You can make a back-and-forth conversation without any questions, and that is one way to avoid the interrogation flavor.

posted almost 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Amadeus‭

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