“Of course, it would make more sense for you to live in Washington, but I’ll bet if your only condition is living in Chicago, they’d do it.” “No possible way.” “Why?” “Because my church is not just about Sundays. We meet frequently. I’m close to the pastor. We meet almost every day.” “And you can’t see living without that.” “I can’t.” “Ray, what if this is a phase? What if you eventually lose your zeal? I’m not saying you’re a phony or that you’re going to turn your back on what you’ve found. I’m just saying the novelty might wear off, and you might be able to work somewhere else if you can
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Marking this passage as an example of a thing that really annoys me in LaHaye’s prose: he lets dialogue scenes run without any narration for a REALLY long time. So long that I sometimes lose track of who is speaking, so I have to trace the every-other pattern back to the top of the page. It’s not technically wrong, but it hurts the moment-to-moment experience of reading. Even adding “<character name> said” tags here and there does a lot to improve the reader’s quality of life. Most people don’t register those sentences as actual sentences (even people who subvocalize). You’re not adding much overhead when you include these; it’s closer to color-coding your dialogue in terms of what a reader experiences. Another problem with this style of writing is that it’s very stale. It promotes the idea that these characters are *just* standing in a room talking — no body language, no character-revealing actions, nothing. Finally, it hurts the pacing of the dialogue. Without any text to take up space between lines, each new line of dialogue feels like the speaker is biting at the previous speaker’s heels to talk. That’s fine when you want a fast-paced scene, like an argument, but for more mundane scenes it’s just too fast.
