Yzabel / September 17, 2005

Triggered by the tidying of a still unexplored room in our house and finding some old “classic” French books, I remembered a belief I had when I was younger. Although I can’t exactly recall why I had it, I suspect it had to do a lot with studying a certain amount of said classic books at school.It could be summarized as follows: “description is better than dialogue”.That’s it, I thought that the longer and the more detailed descriptions were, the better the book would be, too. Dialogue? Some puny thing, used only to provide some relief to the eyes among heavy blocks of text. In fact, I’m more and more certain that our teachers had told us at some point that dialogue was “easy”, and that it denoted a lack of talent in writing.Tell you what, twelve years later, I’m not convinced of this anymore, at least not when it comes to fiction works, and frankly, where else would dialogue wield so much importance anyway?I don’t believe anymore that dialogue is a weak tool, on the contrary. Poor dialogue is pathetic, but such is poor description. Powerful dialogue, on the other hand, dialogue that is well mastered… now this is something strong, that deserves to be used to its full potential. I’d actually like to bash the teachers who caused me to be misled on the head, because this false opinion of mine has prevented me for long to really pay attention to how to craft dialogue, and I’m now struggling with this more than if I had given it a serious look from the start.Indeed, description is important, and hands out very useful clues about what our created worlds and characters look like; too much will likely kill the readers’ imagination, but not enough is a good way to make everything confusing and bland (not that we’d want that). I’m just as aware that a book made of dialogue only, or almost, would be hectic. Both of these elements have their merits ; I wouldn’t even conceive one of my sci-fi or fantasy stories (whether the already written ones or the planned ones) to contain only one or the other just because “dialogue would make my writing look weak”.Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps I shouldn’t be paying too much attention to this, and focus on writing pefect descriptions instead. However, my instincts as much as my own tastes in reading tell me that I need to master both, and that as long as my dialogues aren’t spread on ten pages in a row, I should be fine. A lot can be conveyed through dialogue, from furthering the action to even helping understand a character’s personality, rather than only read about it in a paragraph-long description.With the risk of shocking a few minds, I’d go as far as to say that classics as they may be, some of these books we read in school were just terribly boring, filled to the bone with long descriptions that made me feel like skipping them to find the next bit of action (and I mean by this that they’re still boring me nowadays—it wasn’t just a feeling from an ignorant teenager). It’s fiction I write; as such, I certainly want my stories to be enjoyable, and dialogue seems to be an appropriate and essential tool in this.description, dialogue, writing