I’m not even going to pretend to point fingers. I’ve fallen into this trap myself. “Hey,” I think, “I’m good at dialogue. Dialogue makes scenes go faster. Dialogue is a great way to show conflict and characterize and keep things moving. We’re supposed to show not tell, right? And readers like dialogue. So I’m going to show the entire conversation.”

And two thirds of the conversation is the exact sort of boring warm up we talked about last week.

Just like we need to do in our overall stories and in our scenes, we need to enter a lot of dialogue late and leave early. Skip the greetings and the small talk, and get out of there before the conversation dies out.

I found one way to avoid this in Don’t Murder Your Mystery by Chris Roerden. I’ve mentioned it before:

Flat-out editing can help—especially for phone calls. (Eesh. I hate those!) Roerden uses the example of a phone call from a novel where the protagonist is in her car, realizing she needs to get a clue from her husband. She’s already thought about the context—when they heard it, what bit of information it is exactly—so why show that in a phone conversation? Indeed, after the words “she called him,” the author skips right to the husband’s answer: “‘Yeah, I’ve got it right here. . . ‘”

We can do this in other types of conversations as well—jump into the scene once the dialogue gets to the good part. Like Elmore Leonard, we want to leave the boring parts out!

What do you think? Do you try to enter late and exit early in dialogue? When would you not do this?

Photo by Trevor Devine