The Place For Small Talk

Is there a place for small talk in your novel?

I think there is.

Yes, I know “brevity is the soul of wit.” We should pare down our prose and dialog to the bare minimum for clarity and to maintain the pace, right? After all, readers live busy lives and can’t be expected to live a book too—not when they can race through it to get to the climax.

Really?

I think not. Life has flavor. So should a story.

My advice is to forget all the rules you have read about dialog while you are writing. Give your characters a personality, and then let them speak. There are several reasons for this, the chiefest being that characters are best defined by their actions and speech patterns. One character is flippant and irreverent, another stiffly proper, and a third timid. Their speech and what they are thinking not only round them out, it also makes them flesh and blood instead of constructs. It also helps convey the proper POV. The reader will know who is talking without our adding a plethora of “saids.”

By the way, if you do this, you will find it much easier to conceive a new scene because one or more of your characters can make you see what is going on. After all, they are on the scene.