So, I've been looking at and reading a few stories in the online literary zines and I'm puzzled. For the most part the stories are almost unrelenting paragraphs of nothing but... story. Don't get me wrong, I love a good story but why no dialogue? Could that be the difference between literary and genre work? The absence of a good conversation between characters.
Color me unliterary, but I love dialogue in my stories. Life is full of conversations, so how can you tell a story where people don't talk with each other?
9 comments:
That is painfully true with a lot of them. When I switched genres, I really had to learn to put more dialogue in the stories. On the other hand, I don't like stories that are nothing but dialogue unless they are very short.
I agree about the all dialogue stories, Patti, they need to be flash to work well. One the things I love about dialogue is that it brings a character to life and it breaks up those long blocks of prose.
Reminds me of a writers group I quit partly because of one member who kept making sarcastic comments about all the "white space" in my stories, by which she meant dialogue. She never wanted to see any. At all.
I love dialogue as much as the next guy, but speaking from my experience as a hack writer, I have a very self-conscious relationship to it. I always feel I write too much of it, or that it sucks. So I try to shape up a "necessary dialog" paradigm around my stories, but it's not always easy. I understand your concern though. When dialog is done right, it packs a LOT of power.
I like white space, Al, they give me a chance to come up for air after reading those longgggg paragraphs.
I tend to write more dialogue into a story, too, Ben. I've had to teach myself to make sure there's more action and description so the story is balanced. And I'm still learning :)
I love dialogue too, and it's one of my few strengths.
Yet, one of my favorite short stories, "Sredni Vashtar", has practically no dialogue.
There are always exceptions that work, Manuel, and quite well. I was just surprised to run across so many stories with no dialogue at all. It just seemed so strange after reading crime shorts that tend to depend on dialogue to solve the crimes.
Most of the time, dialogue is where the characters really come to life. Often I start with a bit of dialogue in my head, and use it as the germ for a story.
I do that, too, Manuel! I lay down a paragraph of dialouge and from that comes the possiblity of who and what the characters are up to. It also gives me possible settings.
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