Writing Dialogue Indirectly

Writing dialogue in fiction is not so much about replicating real conversations as it is about creating a realistic impression of how people talk.

Writing dialogue, in other words, is artificial, and the aspiring novel writer must understand that.

If you were to record a conversation between two people in the real world and reproduce it word for word in a novel, it would read terribly, like the worst passage of dialogue you had ever heard.

So you need to use various tricks to give the essence of real speech without actually writing real speech.

The section on How to Write Dialogue is full of these tricks:

• One trick, for example, is to introduce conflict into every exchange of dialogue, so that the fictional conversations, unlike many real ones, have a purpose to them.
• Another is to prune away all of the dead wood that real dialogue is filled with, until what you are left with is pointed and concise.

What I want to talk about in this article concerns a far more drastic kind of pruning.

How to Handle Long Speeches In a Novel

A good rule of thumb when learning how to write dialogue is to keep each speech brief.

Characters should say what they have to say in a sentence or two - three or four at the most - and then shut up so that the other character can respond.

People who drone on and on without letting anyone else get a word in are tedious, in fiction and in real life.

The trouble is that keeping speeches short and concise isn't always possible in novel writing. Sometimes what a character has to say simply cannot be said in a few choice words. It might take several paragraphs, or even several pages of a book in more extreme cases.

• If two fictional characters go out on a first date, for example, and the girl asks the boy his life story, he is not going to be able to sum it up in a couple of neat sentences - not unless he is the laconic type.
• If a detective gathers the murder suspects in the drawing room (I'm thinking about Hercule Poirot here), he cannot simply say, "This has been a perplexing case from start to finish, messieurs at mesdames, but the butler did it by poisoning the soup."
• When the prodigal son returns after years away from home and his family want to know where he has been and what he has been doing, he can't just shrug and say "Oh, you know - bit of this, bit of that."

But a speech in a novel that could potentially drag on for pages and pages - thus boring the readers - is not the only problem here.

A related issue is writing dialogue which conveys information that the reader already knows.

Imagine that a character in a novel goes on a sea-fishing trip with his best friend...

The friend falls overboard in rough seas and the man jumps in to save him.

Later, when the man returns home to his wife, she sees he is upset and asks what has happened.

So he tells her, and the dialogue runs on for many pages.

The trouble, of course, is that the reader already knows what happened on the fishing trip. Listening to him explain it all to his wife will be dull.

But cutting this scene with the wife is not an option because it represents an important emotional milestone for the couple. (They have been drifting apart lately and the saving-a-friend-from-drowning incident triggers a reconnection.)

What is the novel writer to do?

The Solution

The first thing to point out is that, despite everything I have said, writing long speeches in a novel, word for word, can be good...

• When Hercule Poirot assembles the suspects in the drawing room, the reader will expect the denouement to last for many pages. As a matter of fact, they will feel cheated if it is over with too swiftly.
• When the prodigal son returns home, the readers will be just as keen as the boy's family to discover where he has been and what he has been up to all this time. Writing a long speech will not just be unavoidable here, it will be expected and enjoyed.

This does not mean, however, that you should allow the character to talk for page after page without interruption...

• Let other characters chip in the odd line of dialogue here and there.
• Interrupt the dialogue with the odd passage of action or description or interior monologue.
• Make the character who is giving the speech have to go somewhere or do something - but not before promising to finish the story later.

In a nutshell, writing dialogue in the form of a very long speech can be fine in a novel, but only if the content of the speech lies at the very core of the story - and only then if the speech is broken up by chunks of narrative or by other characters talking (or something similar).

But what about when long speeches do not lie at the novel's heart?

What about when they have no emotional weight attached to them? What about when a long speech threatens to be plain dull? What about when the reader is already familiar with the information a speech contains?

Basically, you have two options here...

1. Cutting or rearranging the scene
2. Writing dialogue indirectly

1. Cutting or Rearranging the Scene

Let us return to that scene I mentioned earlier, the one where the man returns to his wife after saving his friend from drowning.

If this scene were not so important to the story, the easiest thing would be to cut it. But it is important. The husband-wife relationship lies at the very heart of this novel, as it is the emotional trauma of nearly losing his best friend that triggers the man to reconnect with his wife.

What's more, there is a neat symmetry to the two situations...

• Just as the man jumped into the stormy seas to save his friend, so the seas of his marriage have been equally rough.
• Just as he struggled to reach his drowning friend in the choppy waters, so too has he been struggling to connect with his wife.
• Just as he finally took hold of his friend's hand and pulled him to safety, so he finally connects with his wife when he returns home.

(Incidentally, this is the kind of symbolism you might want to work into your own novel. But back to writing dialogue...)

Both of these scenes - saving his friend at sea, then returning to his wife to tell her about it - are important. But the fact remains that the long speech, when the man tells his wife what happened that day, will be boring - because the reader already knows the story.

Here, then, are a couple of possible ways to cut or rearrange the scene:

First, you can begin the returning-home scene right at the beginning.

The wife can see something is wrong with her husband the second he walks in. She asks what's up but the man cannot speak. He just stares at her for a few moments then reaches out for her hand. His wife hugs him and, even though she doesn't know what has happened yet, she says everything will be alright.

And the readers know that it will be. The man hasn't spoken a word yet but that will happen later - the long passage of dialogue will happen "off camera", as it were.

Second, begin this scene later, with the man sitting at the kitchen table in fresh clothes and his wife preparing his favorite meal.

She puts the plate down in front of him and makes a joke about him being her hero. The implication here is that the husband has already told her everything that happened, meaning you are now free to concentrate on what is important - the man and woman reconnecting.

2. Writing Dialogue Indirectly

And yet the problem still persists: what do you do if there is no escaping a long and potentially boring speech in a novel?

I can virtually guarantee that in every novel you write this problem will arise somewhere. A character will have something to say, something that will take several pages to write, but it is neither exciting enough nor emotional enough to particularly interest the readers - and not inconsequential enough to leave out.

The solution is writing the dialogue indirectly.

Writing dialogue indirectly is the term I use for dialogue that is told, not shown...

• A speech that is shown is reproduced in full, word for word, with quotation marks around it.
• A speech that is told is summarized in a few sentences of prose.

(See Writing a Narrative by Showing and Telling for more on this.)

And so, in our example, the scene where the man gets home might look something like this...

And so on...

What would take many pages to cover if you were writing dialogue word for word (with quotation marks around it) can be neatly reduced to a brief paragraph when writing dialogue indirectly.

When the final paragraph of summary is over, simply return to the "real time" of the scene and continue as normal, as though the preceding ten minutes of conversation had not been condensed into thirty seconds of narrative summary.

Note that you do not have to summarize an entire long speech by writing dialogue indirectly...

• You, the writer, can have the character start to tell their tale by writing the dialogue word for word.
• You can then slip into narrative summary (or writing dialogue indirectly) for the middle section.
• Then return to writing dialogue word for word again towards the end.

Similarly, this technique of writing indirect dialogue can be used to summarize part or all of a lengthy conversation between two characters.

You could summarize the uninteresting small talk at the start of a conversation, for example, but render the meatier second part of the conversation in proper dialogue.

Whenever you have a long speech given by a character in your novel, or a lengthy exchange of dialogue between two characters, just remember that you do not have to reproduce the dialogue word for word.

Sometimes writing dialogue indirectly is a much better choice.