Dialogue runs the risk of turning into "talking heads." This means a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing but talk. Talking heads are all right in small doses, but if a conversation needs to go on for a while, think of ways to introduce action or visuals to make the conversation into a scene rather than a mere collection of voices.
Here's a simple example. Suppose you're writing a science fiction story and you've reached the point where Jenna has to tell Buck her father was the man who invented the Death Plague. Now Jenna could just come out and say so...but that's just talk, not a scene. Try this instead:
She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out something furry. "You know what this is?"
Buck looked. "A lucky rabbit's foot?"
"No. The rabbit wasn't lucky at all. Look closer."
She held the foot out to him. Buck took it and turned on the desk lamp so he could see more clearly. The foot's fur was mottled gray and white, unlike any rabbit breed he'd seen. The skin beneath was patched and scabby—crusted with the half- healed scars of pustules and lesions. "Death Plague," he said. "I thought it only infected humans. Animals are supposed to be immune."
"They are," Jenna said. "They're immune to the current strain of the virus. But there were earlier strains that infected a wider range of species."
"I've never heard that."
"It's not public knowledge. Few people saw the early strains. But I did. In lab rats. Mice. Rabbits." She took a deep shuddering breath. "This paw belonged to a rabbit I called Easter. When Easter died, I cried so hard that my father gave me the foot after the autopsy. The dissection. God knows why I kept it, but..."
She fell silent. After a while, Buck said, "Your father studied the disease?"
"No. My father made the disease."
Introducing the rabbit's foot changes the conversation into a scene. Instead of just talk, there's action. It's not extravagant action—just pulling out the rabbit's foot and examining it. But readers can visualize what's happening; they can visualize the people and the rabbit's foot.
Introducing objects into a conversation is one way to make conversation into a scene. You should also consider the setting. Having a conversation in a nondescript room gives you nothing to work with; moving the conversation to some interesting venue gives you more chance to dramatize. For example, if you want cops discussing a murder, don't set the conversation in the police station—let the detectives go to the scene of the crime, walk around, stare at blood stains, try to reenact what happened. At the station, they're just talking heads; at the murder scene, they can actually do something.
Another remedy for talking heads is to have people
busy with something else as they talk. Even something
as mundane as eating dinner gives you a chance to create a
scene rather than just conversation. People can be passing
the bread, getting drunk, trying to figure out how to eat
this damned Romulan cuisine...and in the meantime, having a
conversation that serves a different purpose.
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Copyright © 2001, James Alan Gardner