: Re: Is dialogue in a novel necessary, or just padding? I can usually tell the story I want to in less than 10,000 words. I'd really like to accomplish writing a novel and I have a complex idea

@Turnbaugh521

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@Lexi makes a good point here; dialogue is a vital tool to express a character's personality, opinions and so on in a "show" way rather than a "tell" way.

Dialogue enables us to connect directly to the characters. Reported speech has its place, but it makes it feel like I'm sitting here and you're telling me what happened, when what I really want is to experience what happened myself. There are places for it through, for instance; if you have a person who has to explain an event to everyone they meet (Yet again Darryl told his tale, watching the guard's face move from bored, to confused to plain disbelieving.)

Also, and I can't stress this enough, dialogue creates more white space in your pages. A novel with nothing but paragraph after paragraph of narrative and heavy prose is hard on the reader; they like to fly through the pages as it's the only way to stay engaged in the story. If you reject dialogue you make your text harder to read, and you disassociate the reader.

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