: Doing walls of text dialogue right Shakespeare did it, he did it quite a lot of times, but there are a few problems with it: He was a screenwriter in an age, where we couldn't afford building

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Take my advice for what it's worth: I haven't ever sold a book!

I think walls of text can be interesting if they tell interesting stories.

My model for this is Dostoevsky. In Crime and Punishment, there are monologues longer than anything Shakespeare ever dreamed of doing. They give me chills when I read them. In Chapter 2 Raskolnikov meets a drunk in a bar, Marmeladov, who proceeds to tell Raskolnikov the story of his failed marriage, his wife's painful history, and the first time his daughter prostituted herself to support his drinking habit. He doesn't stop talking for hundreds of words, and every word is interesting.

I read "Aspects of the Novel," by E.M. Forster, and one thing he touches on is how the best works in English can't touch the psychological depth of the best works in Russian. I think one of the reasons is that the Russian style allows for more in-depth treatment of certain subjects.

There are some interesting stories hinted at in your dialogue. I guess the theory is 1) bait the reader with hints to interesting stories, and 2) tell the stories later. Why not tell one of the stories in the dialogue itself? Treat it as a 500 word flash fiction exercise. Pour everything into it, emotion, action, your soul. I don't think losing readers is automatically a function of length. Quality also plays a role.

I look at this in the same way I look at pop music. To the aspiring songwriter, you'd say, "Keep it short, attractive hooks, solos no longer than twenty seconds," and so on. The idea is that if you follow the advice, you're Justin Bieber, or the Beatles. George Harrison's creativity is limited to a few calculated riffs, and the song moves on.

Do I think it's bad advice? No, I think it's great advice.

And yet, jazz exists too, and it breaks all those rules. You can give an instrumentalist a twenty minute solo, if it's the right instrumentalist and the right band, and you might reach greater depths in the music than you would by following the rules. Of course, if the solo is bad, better short than long!

I get the brevity thing. I really do. I'm not a millenial, but I spend a lot of time on the computer hopping from thing to thing. We're distracted. We have short attention spans. And yet, some of my favorite passages in literature are long chunks of text, especially dialogue. So there's that, too.

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+1 Thomo. To expand, IRL two people do not stand still and stare at each other and spout dialog while only moving their mouths. Even if they are on the phone! They are doing something, thinking something, wondering, realizing, pausing for some good reason to collect their thoughts or feel some emotion or try to understand a puzzle. The have senses, they hear their environment, they sense temperature and breezes and sun revealed by clouds moving on. They sense incongruities. They are not ready with a memorized answer, after a question imparts new information or a surprise.

Such statements require thinking, thinking requires recall of similar situations, they are reminded of scenes and imagery that relate. That translates into what they say next.

Why the second line "Who are unwitting orphans"? Who was the speaker thinking of? How does he know? Why was he disgusted by the thought? Can you give us some imagery of what he was thinking before he answers so glibly?

In the spirit of help, I would tell a student that a dialogue like the OP offers should be at least three times longer. It is not yet fully imagined, or the author left out too much of what they did imagine. The result is timing that is too rapid, making it feel phony and rehearsed.

Consider a movie and the actors in it. They have memorized the script, they both could just exchange lines as quickly as possible and finish the scene in one minute instead of ten. But they take ten! This dialogue feels like they did the one minute version of a ten minute scene.

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If you've every tried to act Shakespeare, you would know that it is incredibly difficult to stop many of the speeches just being boring because that are such long pieces of uninterrupted speech. It was a different time, a different place and different genre. He is not a model you should try to emulate. However, the statement about sets, etc. doesn't hold true -- minimalist sets are quite common in modern drama. For example, a group of people walk onto the stage and one says: 'Look at all this gold, all these paintings. This tomb is amazing.' The audience doesn't even need a backdrop.

One way to deal with breaking up the story in drama is to have different characters talk about it. One character can be having an argument with the captain. A third one can explain to a fourth why there is antagonism between them. This means you don't just have two people talking to each other.

Some novelists are very successful using long pieces of dialogue. For example, Dorothy L Sayers often has characters speak for a page uninterrupted and it doesn't sound wrong.

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