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The clever use of narrative
dialogue will avoid the sin of
small talk.
Here’s a technique that will do two things: a) eliminate
plain vanilla dialogue sections, and b) give you a chance
to characterize. I call this narrative dialogue.
The term is a riff on narrative summary, which is what
you do when you want to transition from one scene to
the next, or cover some expanse of time without going
step by step (and ending up with a 2,000-page novel).
Simply put, you use limited amounts of narrative to
cover ground that doesn’t contain essential confl ict. If it
does contain essential confl ict, you should show us the
scene, beat by beat.
Narrative summary is like this.
They got in the car and sped toward L.A. Two
hours later they pulled into the parking lot across
from Pershing Square.
So, too, with narrative dialogue. Instead of giving us
the actual talk, you summarize it through the POV char-
acter. Why would you do this? Primarily to eliminate
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dialogue that does not contain tension but does help
us understand the characters.
Here is a section from one of John D. MacDonald’s
Travis McGee novels, The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper.
McGee has just met a woman named Penny in a bar and
they go through introductions and small talk. Too much
of that in actual dialogue form would be boring. Mac-
Donald gives us summary:
So Trav was in town to see a man interested in
putting some money in a little company called Floa-
tation Associates, and Penny was a receptionist-
bookkeeper in a doctor’s offi ce. Trav wasn’t mar-
ried, and Penny had been, four years ago, for a
year, and it didn’t take. And it sure had been a
rainy summer and fall. Too much humidity. And
the big thing about Simon and Garfunkel was the
words to the songs, reely. If you read the lyrics right
along with the songs while the record was on, you
know, the lyrics right on the record case, it could
really turn you on, like that thing about Silence
especially. Don’t you think, honest now, that when
people like the same things and have enjoyed the
same things, like before they ever met, Trav, it is
sort of as if they had known each other a long
time, instead of just meeting? And people don’t
have enough chance to just talk. People don’t
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communicate anymore somehow, and so every-
body goes around kind of lonesome and out of
touch, sort of.
We catch the sense of the woman and of McGee’s at-
titude here, in short order, so the story can go on.
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