Dialog-free Scenes · 3:18pm May 25th, 2015

Today's blog topic is courtesy of Manes. Thank you kindly for the idea

There is a certain flair to minimalism. All the cool authors harp on and on about writing exactly what you need to get your point across and no more. No adjectives, no adverbs, cut the narration, and hang the infodumps. Every so often, an author gets it in their head that we might as well go all the way and ditch the dialog too.

People can get a bit funny when they go this far. You write five or six pages before realizing you have not written a single scrap of dialog. Something is wrong. It must be wrong. When have you ever sat still and said nothing for six pages? Hemingway and Meeester must be right outside your door waiting to smash your computer into tiny bits with Harshwhinny plushes.

Don't Panic.

Breathe.

It is going to be all right.

The first rule of writing is that if it works, it works, and dialogless scenes or even full stories have worked. Just look at Wall-E. Practically the whole first half is spent watching two robots wordlessly doing robot things. The only thing they say is the other's name, and then only sparingly, and yet they end up with an organic, developed, relationship.

So if you were thinking of experimenting with ditching the dialog, have faith. It is very possible. But there is a reason such stories are so rare: many pitfalls await those who try. Having written two myself without a single quotation mark, I would like to share a few tricks of the trade to guide your own exploration.

First, what is "dialogless," anyway? The simplest definition is a scene where no quotations marks are involved. But there are a few things that toe the line. For instance, it is possible to narrate a dialog summation as I do in Three Left Turns:

The dog teased open the bag, but when it saw the glint of gold, a low growl crept from its throat. It shoved the bag away.
The pony took an uneasy step back. It had been more than sufficient before.
The smith spat. Gold could not block a stick. What good was it now?
The pony stepped from hoof to hoof, then straightened. Its horn glowed, and the coins took on a magenta hue. Perhaps the gratitude of a princess would suffice?
The smith snorted. Everyone knew the gratitude would end tomorrow.

Narrators muddy the waters. Technically, there is no explicit dialog, but the underlined bits might as well have been. You can also find whole sections of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Discworld where the narrative pauses for the narrator to monolog about this or that, which might as well be the author engaging in a single-sided dialog with the reader. For the purposes of this blog, a dialogless scene is one with no speaking implied or otherwise, but internal monolog/narrator's commentary on the action are fair game.

The challenges of a dialog-free scene are many, but they generally fall under a few categories: how can I communicate what is going on to the reader, how do I make the scene feel natural, and how do I keep the reader engaged?

The scariest part of going dialogless is that there are not many valid options available for communicating the plot or character motivations to an audience. We are told over and over "explain as little as possible" and "no infodumps," so we end up working our plot into the dialog piecemeal. Twilight tells Spike to tell Celestia that Nightmare Moon is coming, so now the reader knows. Rainbow Dash is suspicious, so she asks if Twilight is a spy. Without the precision of dialog, it is very difficult to give the reader all the information that they need to know to understand a scene at the level you need them to.

If you are going to remove dialog from a scene, you must be cognisant of this drop in precision. There is still a lot of information in actions alone, but it is not always enough. For instance, take the famous (bloody) fight with the Six-Fingered Man from the Princess Bride:

Watch it silent and notice how much we lose. Yes, we do still see Inigo gradually summoning up his strength and overwhelming his enemy, but we lose so much that is integral to both characters. We lose the six-fingered man's snide taunts. Why would Inigo suddenly stop when he has his enemy at his mercy? If we had dialog, we would know of the heroic romanticism so intrinsic to his character that drives him to demand his enemy offer him the world just so he can throw it all away for revenge, but as a silent scene, this complexity is lost.

The best way to solve the communication problem is to think long and hard about the bare minimum that the reader must understand to get something out of your scene. Do they need to know exactly that Rainbow Dash thinks Twilight is a spy, or is it enough that the reader sees Rainbow acting suspicious? Dialogless characterization is best delivered by allowing characters to be defined by what they notice through your description and what they choose based on what they know.

Always ask yourself if your character can infer what the reader needs to know from the bare facts of the scene. Do not be afraid to let your characters touch the scenery, boldly assume, make mistakes, and get messy. Suppose Twilight is taking a long hard look at that bouquet of roses at Roseluck's stand. Is she just window shopping or is she... in cahoots? Well, let's have Rainbow find out. If they were in cahoots, they might get nervous if someone not in the know happened to walk by, so maybe Rainbow is going to casually stroll up to the stand and look around. If they get nervous, Twilight is almost definitely totally a spy.

Honesty is key: you know what everything is, but the reader has only their interpretation of what you have written, so you must write things as they are as much as possible. A very simple pattern to do this is look and react. Give a quick description of something that evokes how it is to be treated, then allow your characters to interact with it based on that description.

A spotless brown stallion with a sheriff's star cutie mark stood ramrod straight at the entrance to the market, his sharp blue eyes drilling into every soul who dared believe their record was clean. Hooked to his vest were a pair of shiny steel hoofcuffs.

Look first to find the challenge. If you have described properly, we should understand the particular character of whatever we are looking at and how it relates to our viewpoint character. Clearly we have a guard, and he means intense, soul-whithering, business. Twilight the spy must solve the challenge of keeping a perfectly innocent face in spite of his furious presence or risk arrest.

Twilight could feel her lips stretch, itching to wince. Just in time, she managed to glue her attention to a bright red candy apple sign just ahead. Even so, she felt that burning scrutiny all the way past.

When your character has looked, they have a few choices. They can react according to what you have just evoked, as above, or they can ask a question. Dash might wonder if he is really all that tough or if he is just hamming it up, so she might go up and stare him right back. And of course, the orthogonal response is a thing too: Pinkie might completely miss the serious business and give him a cupcake. Whatever happens, the guard has seen the response and must react himself and so on and so forth.

Where more precision is needed, context is your best friend. If Rainbow Dash talked to Applejack about her suspicions last scene, then we already know what is going on without any more talking. As the story goes on, it becomes easier to forgo dialog. Characters already know what is going on. The reader knows as much as they do and is familiar with how they react to certain things, so actions become much easier to interpret.

But where context is not possible, you must narrate. No ifs, ands, or buts: if the reader must know, then the reader must know. Narrate, monolog internally, put up a sign, do whatever you need to do to get the message across in big bold letters because it is better to be a little infodumpy than leave a reader confused. Later, you can ask your pre-readers for advice on how much you can get away with cutting.

The trick to narration is that telling shows as much as you want it to. Which is more interesting:

Twilight was a spy.

Twilight was most certainly not a spy. It was just that black jumpsuits were in this season. Rarity said so.

One is plain boring fact. The other tells us many things, but the unsaid implication is that obvious spy is obvious. Just because you are narrating does not mean that you must plain lay everything out for us. Just because you say flat out something is the case does not mean the reader will believe you. Dig down to the core truth of what you want to get across, tell it in the most interesting way that you can, and do not forget to back up your narration with a scene that acts as though these facts you speak of are true. If everyone acts natural around jumpsuit-Twilight or several other mild-mannered ponies are wearing jumpsuits, then maybe the narrator told the truth after all.

Remember that your scene must first be effective and natural. Making it dialog-free is a secondary personal goal. There are some very specific types of scenes that must be done without dialog and a few that can work either way, but the vast majority of scenes are best done with some dialog. The more hoops you have to jump through to make your scene work, the more likely it falls in the latter category.

The key to making a dialogless scene feel natural is to adopt the attitude that dialogless scenes are found, not made. One does not simply take a scene and hack all the dialog out of it because if you did not need that dialog, you would not have wrote it in the first place. Your characters do not know they are not allowed to speak. They just want to do their thing in the simplest way that fits their character. Thus, if you find yourself wanting to add a few lines of dialog, you probably should for the sake of the scene.

How might an experimenting author find a dialog-free scene? Ask: why are your characters not talking? What is it about what they want or their circumstances that makes talking not the option they want to take? The easy way out is enforced silence: Twilight is a spy, so she does not want to talk and give away her position in the tall grass. While this can lead to a serviceable scene, it is arbitrary. The temptation is to think of all the things that Twilight might want to say. She cannot speak, so she mimes her secret message to Fluttershy who is snorkelling in the pond. The restriction is just that: a restriction, and restrictions are things you work against rather than make them work for you.

Unless you intend to have silence be an obstacle to overcome, the less your scene is concerned with talking, the more natural it will be when the dialog goes away. Why would Rainbow think to talk when there is no one around and she is occupied with stalking Twilight? Instead of focusing on communicating, describe what she is seeing. Add some narration so we can follow Rainbow's interpretation of what is unfolding. If you have gone two or three pages without even thinking about writing dialog, you are doing it right.

This brings us to scenes where no more need be said: there are two or more characters directly interacting, but neither speaks. Twilight follows the coded message she received to a moonlit back alley where spymistress Rarity is waiting to give her the next level of training. Rarity sits in the middle of the alley, unspeaking: to talk would ruin the test. If Twilight is ready, she should already know what to do.

These scenes are all about what characters have in common and what they piece together on the fly. If Twilight is ready for the next level of training, what should she know to do? What does evidence is Rarity looking for? There is also the element of mystery: how certain are your characters that they know what is going on? Are they actually right? What if Twilight is a double-agent? Words are worthless here because we can say anything we want without it necessarily being true. Think of what evidence your characters think the other wants. The challenge is to have them provide this evidence as best as they are able.

Hopefully, this will get you started on keeping things natural, but how do we keep the reader engaged? The same way that you keep them engaged with a regular scene, but with a few adjustments.

Going dialog-free puts the emphasis on showing, and as we have already seen, showing reduces your ability to give a precise meaning to everything going on. This means that you will need to pay extra attention to the focus of your scene. Who are we focusing on? What are they doing in this scene? How do we feel about it? The faster you can throw your reader a hook, the quicker they can figure out what to make of your scene and get invested.

The standard tricks apply. Give the reader a question: open on a mysterious masked mare standing motionless in a moonlit alley. Who is she? How is Twilight going to respond? Present us with a character in the middle of doing something: have Rainbow Dash snooping for evidence that Twilight is a dirty spy with some narration for context. What does she find? Does it add up? What evil plot does she suspect Twilight is up to? Do whatever it takes to give the reader some stake in the scene.

Once you have established that focus, stick to it. Remember that your focus is your camera: the reader assumes that you are always telling them about the most important thing in the moment. Where are your characters looking? What are they paying attention to? If Rainbow Dash is sneaking through the market and you get carried away describing the awnings, then the reader is going to be confused: why are the awnings important to figuring out if Twilight is a spy? It is possible to connect the two. Perhaps Rainbow is looking for Owlicious keeping watch from the air? If so, mention the purpose so the reader does not think you have lost interest in your original focus, or cut it if it was not that important to the scene.

Remember outer description can also convey how your character is feeling internally. Twilight walks alone through a long, dark, alley. Fear draws her eyes to all the shadowy places someone could jump her from. Describe with a purpose to keep the reader on track even when you want to fill in around the edges.

Once you have focus down, you should start worrying about the nuts and bolts. Without dialog, you are left with action, description, and narration to build your story. We have seen the problem with description is that it can wander and get off topic. The problem with action is the dreaded list of stuff. Rainbow Dash did this, then she did that, and finally she did the other thing. She went hither. Now she is tither.

Lists of action are samey to write and dull to read, so what do we do about them? If you suspect you are going into action mode, ask yourself if all the little things are part of a larger action. Twilight could open the secret inside pocket of her jumpsuit, unbutton the secreter inside-inside pocket, draw out a plain compact case, pop it open, remove a tracking bug, and fit it to the bottom of Cranky's cart. Or she could just slip a tracking bug from her jumpsuit's inside pocket and fit it to Cranky's cart. Cut intermediary steps as much as possible.

If there is quite a bit of action you have to cover, there are still ways to keep your sentences varied by changing length, complexity, and subject.

Twilight glanced about. Everypony was occupied with shopping. A hoof went for the secret inside-inside pocket of her jumpsuit, and one vial of tacky glue later Cranky's cart was thoroughly bugged.

By changing sentence subject and structure and mixing in some quick in-line description, you can keep repetition at bay.

And last but not least there is a delicate balance to be struck with narration: readers want to know what is going on, but at the same time half the point of a dialogless scene is leaving it up to the reader to "get" what is going on. My advice is to over-narrate the first draft, cut it down on your first editing run, and then rely on your pre-readers to figure out where to go from there. Remember that you write your story knowing one way that everything could make sense: the way you planned it all in your head. But your readers are going to approach your story with no preconceptions. Getting fresh eyes is a must for checking understandability.

Be aware that there are some realizations we want the reader to come to on their own and then there are supporting facts. Look through your scene for turning points, shocking reveals, and other places where you are capitalizing on the reader finding something out in that moment and not before. These are your core realizations. Your goal is to feed your reader just enough info that things become clear exactly when you want the light bulb to pop on.

Hint at core realizations; be more up front with supporting details. When Twilight walks into the alley, is it important to find out Rarity is a spymistress? Then keep that info to yourself and let the reader and Twilight find out for themselves. If we should be more focused on how Twilight is going to show she is on the level, then use your narration to introduce Rarity as "Spymistress Rarity" so the reader will not waste time wondering who she is. Leave the interesting questions open until the time is right and close down the worst distractions as unobtrusively as possible.

At its core, a dialogless scene is just line any other scene: get your characters, pick a focus, and do your thing. The difference is that a dialogless scene involves circumstances or characters who understand they will be more effective without dialog. The key to crafting such a scene is to give your characters something to do besides talking or otherwise give them a stake in the silence. From there, the rest of your execution should be concerned with the reader: how are they going to know what is going on, and how will you keep your prose palatable without dialog to break things up? Should you juggle these interests properly, you should find yourself naturally writing for pages without thinking once about adding a speaking part.

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