Assalamu Alaikum,
Last week I wrote to you about why readers quit sword & sorcery stories when atmosphere takes precedence over character wants. Today I want to talk about dialogue, and how you can spot whether a book’s dialogue is worth your time before spending a nickel on it.
Prose that’s performing for the reader relies on literary observations, wordplay, and witty sentence structures that look brilliant on paper but are completely dead when taken “holistically”. If the humor in a line disappears when you take away the specific wording, it’s a page joke. So, the writer is “performing”. Legit character-driven humor is visual and actionable. It comes out of situation, behavior, and conflict. So, a character slipping, or lying really badly are good examples. Think of the meme about the dog sipping tea while everything’s on fire saying “this is fine.” The humor lives in the character’s behavioral reaction to pressure, as opposed to the clever vocabulary of the writer. When prose is “performing”, every character sounds suspiciously like the writer. You’ll notice the same snark, vocabulary, and worldview. It’s a one-man show. Character-driven humor carries individual history, ego, education level, and anxieties. A character isn’t funny because they’re farting out punchlines. They’re funny because their specific flawed worldview and colliding desires get exposed under the heat of a situation.
Something similar was going on when I read The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, a 1934 mystery by Harry Stephen Keeler. I knew going in the plot was bonkers. The prose was good and interesting, the dialogue was witty, but the underlying structure of the story was all over the place. That’s what made me bounce.
Writing well requires genuinely looking at things from a point of view that isn’t your own, because not everyone will believe what you believe (what a shocker!). A lot of what gets published simply doesn’t manage it.
Don’t look at the cover or the blurb. Look at the first 3 to 6 pages. Dialogue is the most immediate tell of a writer’s craft level. Put your finger over the character’s name and read the lines. If every character shares the same cadence, vocabulary, sarcasm and sentence length, you’re looking at an amateur. The writer is talking at you from their own head instead of letting characters speak from their own backgrounds. If it sounds like a homogeneous witty talk-show interview rather than a collision of different people, give it a miss. Also look for characters explaining things to each other they both already know (e.g. “ever since your cat died 6 months ago.”) Great dialogue respects the reader’s intelligence and lets mystery exist. And unless the scene is a courtroom, characters shouldn’t talk in a Q&A loop. Real people deflect, avoid, or counterattack when pressed.
Wes
P.S. Our latest book, The Hierophant’s Game, is here if you’re interested: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1965754295