How can I make my dialogue-heavy scenes less "talking heads"-y?

I love dialougue. I love having all sorts of different personalities act, I love crafting each character's unique voices, such as how one will say "Jesus man, you nearly fuckin' killed me there!" and another will say "Could you please be more careful, dying really isn't on my agenda today?" for the same thing.

I hate having to write what's going on during dialogue-heavy scenes. Obviously, a long string of quotations with nothing else is just "talking heads" and takes the reader out of the story. But what do I when the characters are legitimately just standing around and doing nothing of importance? Having your characters do random minor actions just to have something to describe is incredibly repetitive and makes them all out to be neurotic histrionics. And just saying "X said/yelled/remarked/ejaculated/pontificated/fivedollarword-ed" is practically a writing mortal sin so I can't do that.

Sometimes I try to get around this by describing the characters' emotions and reactions to the dialogue, but this is breaking Show, Don't Tell; I've had it beaten into me that describing your characters' emotions at all is another writing mortal sin, and that their actions and dialogue alone should be enough (though I've more recently found that to be a little melodramatic and stopped following it so much).

So, uh, yeah. How can I make scenes where nothing much besides dialogue is happening not grind the story to a halt?

EDIT: What the hell happened to my post? There's "\"'s everywhere EDIT 2: And now there's not. What.

edited 30th Jan '15 9:28:50 PM by Frostav

Describe what they're doing while talking. Facial tics; idle habits, etc. And it's perfectly acceptable to go into an internal monlouge during a conversation when nescessary. If they're hiding their emotions, how else are we to know how they feel?

Well, usually when two people are just talking, things like the area they're talking in might come into clearer detail. A fly buzzing around the room is a lot more noticeable when its two people talking and nothing more. If someone is anxious, the brightness of the lighting might be more bothersome than otherwise.

Of course, you can explore a character's interests and, well, characterization through small actions that you mentioned. And I don't mean 'X walked to the window. Y got up from the table. Z leaned against the wall' and etc, but more interesting actions. A character who plays music might look at someone's CD Collections or run their fingers across the piano or guitar in a common space.

I recently had a similar issues where I had the protagonist of my story and his love interest talking but it wasn't flowing well enough. I needed a way to break up the conversation a tad bit. So, I figured that maybe the world he's entered had interesting fashion choices and he had incorrectly put on some of the garments (suspenders for his knee-high boots hanging from his belt, sash goes outside the coat instead of inside). During the conversation, the love interest is correcting all the mistakes making a normal conversation rather funny.

A few scenes later, I needed the love interest character to relay information to the protagonist at a ball. Instead of having them find a small broom closet to discuss things and just stand there, they go onto the dance floor where it'd be hard for anyone to hear what they're saying and I can describe the dance moves, other guests at the ball, and even get some exposition across about the culture of the world.

Over time, I had learned that for the dialogue in non-action scenes not to feel ... stagnated, things have to change as the scene progresses. The change does not have to be profound, but it has to be.

What exactly does that mean?

Well, it means that the situation or the characters can't be static. If the situation isn't changing due to the talking, take the characters and have them do something, make it so that if you, an observer, were to describe what the character is doing in the scene, that description would change over time. That is why something else has to be happening, no matter how small, because otherwise the description will be a static "the character is talking". Even if that "something" is the character pouring themself some tea.

Now, obviously there are situations where people do talk without doing anything else, yes. However, if you base those situations on real life, you will notice that in those situations there is always some underlying drama, something that either causes the state of the plot to change (which by itself prevents it from being static) or introduces a conflict of some sort (which means that something is happening).

You can also, unless the perspective in the story is such that we never get to hear them, have the character to it is attached in that scene voice their own thought, think about what is happening. That, too, serves to provide a contrast with the dialogue that helps to make it feel more active.

And above all, remember that unless it is important for the readers to know the exact words of every single sentence in that conversation for some reason—which by itself should be rippling the plot enough that it will not appear still, unless the conversation is supposed to show the readers something about some character, in which case the mannerisms and action matter even more than they usually would and thus you probably shouldn't skip those—the conversation can be skipped, important details summed up, and any words that matter "recalled" later by the characters.

Additionally, and that is something I want you to note, using words like "said" in the narrative is not necessarily a wrong move, nor a "sin" as you'd called it (I dislike using that particular word, sorry about it). The point is to know how to use it, and when. If you use it, in a scene where there are more than just two characters (and thus pointing out who is speaking might be prudent unless their speech patterns are just that indicative of their identities) and where every character is doing something, to indicate that the character who is replying at that very moment is not doing anything but talking, it is acceptable. It's like using spices when cooking; knowing how much to use and when is essential to getting something edible.

And the same thing goes for Show, Don't Tell. Of course it is better to present the characters via their actions and words rather than just saying that the character is feeling this-or-that. However, creative approach means that you can essentially "show the readers what is being told". For example, have one of the characters participating in the scene try to connect it all, show their train of thoughts and the mental commentary going on inside of their head; that way you will be able to show their emotions rather than just saying they feel that way, but at the same time their thoughts will serve as another discussion (even if a one-person discussion and thus more of a monologue), parallel to the one between all the characters, which will introduce contrast in the scene; and the character's—visible to the readers—internal dialogue and the associated emotions will change as the scene goes on, will also introduce the change to the scene itself.

Show, Don't Tell is a great thing, but that too is a spice that has to be applied in appropriate amount and to appropriate things. It is just as often underused as it is overused, because people who learn about it are too afraid of not using it enough and thus go too far.

edited 31st Jan '15 6:42:54 AM by Kazeto

Funnily enough, I had that problem with a very specific story. It's just that whatever muse program was running in my mind made the characters so that they talked about the plot as it was happening, and it was like they needed to in order to share information with each other and make more plot happen (of course, by talking to other characters).

I just switched to another story that just happened to run on a muse program that was more scenic and taciturn, and I don't even mean as a defining feature, it was just slightly more balanced. When my attention returned to the talky story, it just wasn't as much of a verbal ping-pong match to type out anymore.

About what Kalzeto said, one thing that I found useful was to outline the scene (at the very least, the purpose of the scene) and get a feel for the following developments: static (no change at all), jumping (change apropos of nothing), and rising (the sort of development that you want. #11 here.)

edited 31st Jan '15 8:04:36 AM by Faemonic

Has anyone considered the Script Fic? Writing as stage directions, tell the name of a character and then his/her dialogue, with actions in [brackets] or italics. It helps to avoid the use of the word "said" or similar terms. Then, you can paragraphs for the more action-y, less talk-y scenes.

Now stating the obvious: conversation means back-and-forth talking. Instead of one or more massive sections of dialogue from a single person, break the talking of one and pass it to another. If he's alone, give some pauses. There's the same amount of words, but now it is presented in easy-to-bite fragments. Remember the basic rules of writting (as in reading and writting any text, not just fiction), one idea leads to another, remember the reason we use sentences and paragraphs.

Mine can get very Talking Heads-y as I tend to have scenes where people sit down and talk or they're just walking and talking.

Later I go back and try to insert minor actions into the mess to break it up a bit.

In one of my current works there's a lot of talking where the characters meet for the first time and learn things about each other - and through those conversations - what they say, how they phrase it - the readers learn about them.

I've had them arrive one at a time so that it's not just one huge chapter of everyone sitting around introducing themselves, but there's still a lot of dialogue and I'm having a devil of a job putting breaks in the dialogue.

Aside from things that are happening outside the dialogue (and something is ALWAYS happening), there are senses other than seeing and hearing. Put two guys in an interrogation room and explore that scene as fully as possible.

The officer might be asking the suspect questions but they're also experiencing the room, each other, and themselves. Maybe the overhead light is flickering in and out. Maybe the officer is looming over the suspect, threatening to lock him up and throw away the key. Maybe the officer is getting hot, loosening his tie and rolling up his sleeves. Maybe the suspect can't stop crossing and uncrossing his arms, leaning forward and then back.

All of that kind of detail makes a scene richer. If you think of chapters as sequences of scenes, which are snapshots of events, then it's easier to focus on the details of each scene. Add all that to the characters' motives and personalities, and you can get a very dynamic scene that feels "real" to the reader.

I tend to note emotes in between lines, shrugs, winces, frowns, smiles, chuckles. Almost every line not spoken in military discipline tends to have some reaction, no matter how small.

Thanks to acting, I managed to break out of my talking-heads tendencies.

A lot of people in real life just naturally sit and talk, aside from fidgety/energetic people. But even so, everyone's going to interact with their environment at least once or twice, and that also gives a few details about the environment by extension.

I have a habit of fiddling with my braid, for example—a couple of people have mentioned it makes me look fidgety, but I just do it because I need something to do with my hands.

If there's a table, someone's going to mindlessly tap a song out on it or pick at the tablecloth, and they might play around with the chairs. If they have food, whether they're eating/drinking or not is going to key in to their emotional state right now.

Relaxed people will space their bites/drinks out to make sure they can talk evenly. Agitated people might forget about their food entirely, but eventually they'll notice their food's gone cold or their ice cream's half-melted. Alternately, they'll eat to avoid conversation or buy themselves time to think.

If they're in a car, there's LOTS of environmental stuff to note during the conversation: Rude drivers cutting them off, lots of traffic and they're pissed, no traffic and they're happy, that sort of thing.

I could go on about the little things you can notice, but that's just a little bit.

The problem with just inserting things to spruce up dialogue is the fact that it's sidestepping the problem of the dialogue not being intriguing enough to carry the scene it's in. It doesn't fix anything; it adds superfluous and extraneous description to an already boring passage.

Writing strong dialogue is one of the harder parts of creative writing to master, and I'll routinely scrap and rewrite 3000+ word dialogue sequences if I don't think it's good enough to go into the next draft.

That may be true to a certain extent, but I don't know anyone who wants to read a page of uninterrupted text, whether it's dialogue or not.

You must not know many avid readers, as lengthy dialogue passages are very common in literature. Of the fiction books I have sitting next to me at the moment, only one of them lacks heavy dialogue scenes and it's Alice In Wonderland, where most of the exchanges are comprised of puns and one-liners. The rest (Dune, Enders Game, Hyperion, Stranger In A Strange Land, The Lathe Of Heaven) are all saturated with several pages of dialogue at a time. And for the most part, it works in those books because it's well-written and interesting to read.

Well, there's also the fact that dialogue sequences aren't the only thing to be found in those books so there's contrast between those parts of the books and the surrounding parts, though actually being written in an interesting way is a part of the reason too.

Point being, when it's written properly, there being nothing but dialogue when characters talk implies that either they are talking quickly enough that there's no time to do anything else (ping-pong dialogue, so to say) or that for whatever reason the perception of the surroundings is centred on the dialogue to such a high degree that no attention is paid to anything else. And it works, for as long as the author knows how to pull it off.

I wasn't saying there aren't many BOOKS that have walls of text, I just said most people don't like READING walls of text.

I understand that and I think when you read a story that well-written, you'll forget that you're slogging through a wall of text, which is awesome. But how common is that, really? I'll admit, I'm not as well-read as I'd like to be because "the classics" tend to be too dry for my taste and most contemporary stuff is...just bad. I mean, I remember reading Austen and Dickens in high school, and I enjoyed them overall but they still read as dry at times and walls of text were all too common.