can a book without dialogue work?

In the sense of an epistolary novel Bram Stoker's Dracula is a good example. It abounds with dialogue however.

Regards,
Scott

Yeah, I was kind of baffled by the epistolary novels not having dialogue thing. They frequently have a lot. But it's not a type of novel I'm crazy about and has a dated feel to it. Still if someone wants to do one and it's good, that's what counts.

Not an entire novel. It can be done with short stories, but it's extremely hard for me to imagine this being done with a work of novel length (say 50k words or more).

A great short story that doesn't have a word of significant dialogue in it would be "To Build a Fire," by Jack London. It's a classic naturalist story told from an omniscient POV, and it's extremely good. It's very vivid, and there's not a line of dialogue in it until the end, when the man the narrator has been talking about says "You were right, old hoss, you were right," to nobody in particular before he dies.

ChaosTitan said:

You're right, the format has worked in the past, and I'm sure it will continue to work again in the future. However, without any real plot details, it's difficult for anyone here to offer up advice.

The first book I always think of when someone mentions a diary is "The Notebook." However, that novel is still bookended by scenes that explains the contents of the titular notebook. Are you planning on doing something like this?

ETA: fixed the thread title for you

Click to expand...

I think that a collection of journal entries is pretty much the only way that successful novel length works without dialogue have been in the past. If you're expecting to write a novel length work with no significant dialogue, then you are at least on the right path with the idea of journal entries. All else is in the details and none of us here can tell you ahead of time how well that would work out.

Reader response: I would wonder why an alien commander, who was presumably physically and cognitively different from humans, and incredibly busy to boot, would be writing a journal.


Writer response: I was told at Clarion to work on noticing the difference between a conceit and an idea. A conceit being something like "Hey, what if I wrote a story all in different first lines?" and an idea being something that had characters, in a setting, interacting in some way.
I think the big difference is that an idea has human interest, whereas a conceit is just cute.

I'd think a novel in journal form for the sake of it is a conceit. If you have good reasons why it would be appropriate given the situation, perhaps what you have is an idea. But I'm not seeing it in what you've said, perhaps because you don't want to talk about the idea itself.

Here's my question: why would there be no dialog in a novel written as a journal? In epistolary novels, I can understand why there would be no "dialog" beyond that inherent in an exchange of letters. As someone who kept a daily journal for years, however, I have to say that my journal was chock full of dialog that I tried to record faithfully. I always wrote down important conversations.

Not really. It's still spoken words, identified in quotes, with a tag to identify who said it and how.

Dialogue in a book is a conversation that's written down...

No, no difference.

(Different from, by the way.)