Dialogue in Stories

I was thinking about the kind of comics I write, and then for some reason I started thinking about the formal storytelling methods I was taught in school. I think I started thinking about those methods because so few of my stories follow them.

Traditional storytelling relies on conflict, which is traditionally described in the most boring general terms imaginable: internal and external. English classes manage to boil down every interesting thing that has ever happened into three unappetizing lumps: man vs. nature, man vs. man, and man vs. himself.

Jesus wondering why he has been chosen to save the entire human race, and whether he can go through with the necessary sacrifice, would be lumped into the man vs. himself category. And possibly man vs. nature, if you consider nature to be an aspect of God.

Actually, right there I've just shown how ill-fitting these categories can be, and that's to be expected, since they are generalizations. Generalizations, otherwise known as stereotypes, are usually ill-fitting when applied to individual cases. But that's not actually what I started this post to talk about.

The main reason my stories don't fit into traditional storytelling methods is because they tend to be mostly dialogue. And not dialogue designed to propel a narrative, or get my characters to grow and change as people. My characters tend to just sit around and chit-chat.

Now that I think about it, that tends to be the format of most sitcoms. Or talk-shows, for that matter. And reality shows. But why do people watch these things, if they don't conform to the traditional, accepted model of conflict, rising action, climax, resolution? I mean, sitcoms pay lip service to this plot model: Joey buys an ugly sweater, people keep telling him it's ugly, the situation climaxes when Joey's idol makes fun of the sweater at a public event, Joey realizes he has bad taste - burns the sweater, cue credits. But the audience doesn't give a flying Finn about Joey's sweater. The entire plot is just a bare string for the writers to hang jokes on. Joey's character doesn't develop, and things go back to normal for the next episode.

But I don't think the reason people watch these types of shows is because they're stupid or easy to entertain. People like dialogue-heavy stories because conversation is conflict. We don't spend the majority of our lives having meaningful moments that change our behavior and shape our perceptions of life. We spend most of our lives telling our friends how much we hate their favorite tv shows, or complaining about the service at restaurants, or saying as little as possible as the women in our lives spend 20 minutes arguing about which movie our group should see. We spend our lives talking.

And while it's easy to see the "external conflict" conversation can provide when we're arguing with someone else, conversation is also an internal conflict. Even if your position is clear in your mind, expressing it in a way that is concise and convincing is a challenge. And if you're actively engaged in a conversation (and not just reciting a list of your preformed opinions) you could find your opinions changing, even as you speak them. Have you ever spent half an hour arguing a point at a party, only to realize much later that you were wrong, and the other person was right? That's why people enjoy conversations so much - they can change the way we look at the world. Sometimes I'll see a movie I think is garbage until my friend explains why it's not. This kind of back-and-forth as two different perceptions clash is exactly what conflict is about.

Of course, all this time when I've been talking about conversation, I've really been talking about thought. Speech is just the output of thought. All that pondering and weighing and analyzing goes on silently in our heads. We merely pause it while we spit out words, and then we crank it back up again.

But all of this stuff is invisible to the audience, who probably want people to stop talking every once in awhile to blow something up or makeout, so dialogue doesn't get its due. Oh sure, people say they love wit, and quote lines that have nothing to do with the central plot, but at the end of the day they still claim to prefer dialogue that advances plot to lines that are "just" entertaining.

Here I think I've stumbled onto yet another topic, but I have to end this blog somewhere, so I'll just address it briefly. That topic is length, specifically, how films have condensed story-length, conditioning us to expect stories to only hit the big moments and barrel through the plot as directly as possible. But which have you spent more time watching in your life, films or tv shows? The Godfather or Gilmore Girls? The point being that dialogue that has no point is closer to real life, while dialogue that exists solely to advance plot is artificial, condensed for maximum dramatic effect. They are different, but not better or worse. Both have a place in culture.

I guess I subconsciously chose meandering dialogue. Well, looking at this post, it seems obvious why. Clearly, I like to talk.