: 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

@Annie587

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Lexi is surely right in saying "it depends". But that said, a novel with no dialog would be quite strange. If you had a story about someone living alone on an island or some such, the story might be purely narration and his internal train of thought. One can always dream up other odd cases, like a story about aliens who do not speak but communicate by waving their tentacles in standardized patterns.

But if you're talking about a story about people who, in fact, interact by speaking, then how would you have no dialog? Would you repeatedly write thinks like, "Bob told Ann that ..."? If you had some point in doing this, like you're trying to say something about the nature of communication, maybe. But I think it would be largely a gimmick. It could work for a short story, but for a novel, I think you'd be beating the gimmick to death.

Dialog is not "padding", it's a key component of most stories. Well, I suppose almost everything that happens in a fiction story is "padding" in some sense. You could reduce, say, "Casablanca" to, "During World War 2, a French resistance leader and his wife, trying to escape from the Nazis, are trapped in Casablanca. They meet a man who turns out to be a former boyfriend of the wife and who convinces her to leave her husband and stay with him. But then he concludes that this would be wrong, tells her to stay with her husband, and helps the two of them to escape. The end." That about sums up the story, but rather leaves out everything that made it a great story. Without the action, the suspense, the playing out of the romance, etc, we're left with a very dry and boring tale.

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