How To Write Long Dialogue Please?

Sounds more to me like the chief constable is the one who's going to solve the case rather than the brilliant detective with all of that information. Makes me wonder what key piece they're missing.

If you've already covered the chief constable finding out all of this information in the story, I think it'd make more sense to make the chief constable telling the brilliant detective more of a summary type part. 'The chief constable related all of the facts of the case to the brilliant detective. He made sure to emphasis the presence of the money and his idea that the murderer was more interested in the cheap pocket watch that was missing from the body.'

If you haven't covered the search for information within the story, there's nothing that says that the brilliant detective can't question the chief constable. 'You say that the money is all in the briefcase, was anything else missing on the body?'

But if you want a huge block of dialogue, I'd probably read a few modern mystery novels to see how it's done, but also check out Sherlock Holmes for examples.

I wouldn't do it. I'd just have the Constable give a few bare facts, which are all he knows. If the detective really is brilliant, he'll figure everything else out on his own.

Read Sherlock Holmes, or watch/read anything with a brilliant detective, pro or amateur. It's the brilliant detective who should finge out all the facts, come up with a motive and suspects, and solve the crime. The less his superiors, or the police at all with an amateur detective, know, the better.

I think the clue to the kind of dialogue you're suggesting should be constructed as a conversation. I agree with the post above that it wouldn't serve your central premise to introduce a 'brilliant' detective and then have him/her be lectured to. I think for this to be realistic there have to be some huge gaps in what the constable knows about the case and, if so, then an interesting - and relevant - dialogue can ensue between the two characters, maybe ending in a "Aha!" moment. Or, at the very least, one that propels the detective to want to go further.

I agree, the brilliant detective would be the one to figure out the stuff. He should have the bare bones of the case and work from there. Unless you're writing a short story a la Encyclopedia Brown, who is given a big chunk of details and figures out the missing piece that solves the mystery.

justlukeyou said:

Thanks, I think Sherlock Holmes woukd be perfect. I just don't not sure how iften I should use dialogue tags. I want the dialogue to be very free flowing. Get all the boring stuff out the way and allow the detective to get on with the high end stuff only je is capable of dealing with.

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That's why it's important to break up potentially long dialogue passages with a conversational scheme like (just off the top of my head, so it'll be a bit lame. Just make sure it's engaging and keeps the reader interested):

"The victim's name is Jane Doe, twenty seven, works at Lawson and Lawson," the constable said.

"A lawyer with a drug problem," the detective said.

"How can you say that?" the constable asked. "I can assure you she's clean. I know her father."

"Sure, she was discrete, but the small circle of needle marks on her left thigh say differently -- "

"Now, hang on," the constable interrupted. "She was a diabetic and no drugs were found in her car."

"And the pathology report?"

The constable's face hardened.

"Tell me what else you know," the detective asked, crouching down to the dead woman.

justlukeyou said:

Thanks, I think Sherlock Holmes woukd be perfect. I just don't not sure how iften I should use dialogue tags. I want the dialogue to be very free flowing. Get all the boring stuff out the way and allow the detective to get on with the high end stuff only je is capable of dealing with.

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If you call the content of this long stretch of dialogue 'boring stuff', then your reader will find it boring.

Skip over it in summary, or let the detective work it out for himself. Because honestly, this sounds like it would be dull to read.

p.s. I'm writing an ancient Egyptian detective novel, of sorts. I'd never do this in a big lump of dialogue, because even if my police chief needs too get a load of information from one source, I find better ways of doing it, e.g. his scribe reads a report to him, which I gloss over in summary, but just then his deputy walks in and he absolutely grills him about the details of the report, allowing me to focus on he interesting bits, and also get some reaction and conflict into the scene.

You can break up the information with characterization or a subplot. So the actual dialogue conveys the information you want the detective (and reader) to have, and the beats in the conversation have the detective doing things that show his personality. Or there could be a subplot, like a romance or a rivalry between two officers or whatever else, and that could be played out over the beats.

I'd also recommend you think carefully about just what information the reader needs. Anything else can be "told" rather than "shown", ie, "the officer gave the detective a quick summary of the details discovered so far."

You can leave off much of the info by using a statement that the Chief Constable informed him, and then have the detective reveal the particulars as needed later in the story.


"What do we got, Constable?"

"A body and some flowers."

"Fill me in."

After hearing the details, Jack's coffee was cold, his donut was stale and his stomach was turned upside down.

[Then later]

Jack could tell that this body had been sliced like sashimi and covered with roses just like the one-armed homeless man in the park.

What's the point of the scene?

If it's just to convey the Constable's information to the detective, don't bother with dialog. A one-sentence summary ("the Chief Constable related all the particulars of the case so far to Our Brilliant Hero") is sufficient. If you need the reader to know the particulars, a couple more sentences of efficient exposition will do the trick and let you move on to more interesting story-stuff.

If the purpose of the scene is to develop the characters & their relationships, you need to foreground the characterization and interactions -- which again means you do NOT want to have the Chief Constable delivering a big lump of fact to Our Brilliant Hero, who just listens and takes it. You need to give them both something to do and say that reveals something about them, not just the facts of the case. (In fact, you still don't need to detail the facts in dialog, unless there's something in the narration that's particularly significant or worth while from a character or relationship perspective.)

As a general rule of thumb -- when you're writing dialog, try not to let a character speak more than 2 sentences per turn unless you're working in a highly stylized mode or you want them to come across as pompous windbags.

Another general rule of thumb -- if it's boring to you, it will probably be boring to readers. (Though the opposite may not be true...)

Skip the boring bits. Readers will, & then they'll be annoyed if it turns out you buried something important in the lump they didn't bother to read.

Instead of having one character voluntarily tell information to another, try having one character needing to know the information held by the other and having to pry it out, preferably with the other character (for his own reasons) reluctant to reveal it.

Long conversations are no different to short ones. They should flow back and forth with clarity - and lead somewhere.

If the information is already known to the reader and it's simply a case of having it passed on to someone else - such as in the OP example - there's no need for the conversation to be covered in detail, or on stage, at all.

As others have stated, a long string of dialogue probably wouldn't work well in this scenario. But if you ever have the need for long dialogue from a single character, break it into paragraphs, like this:

"Blah blah blah. More words. Blah blah. Lots more words. This is all part of a single paragraph of dialogue. More words. Blah blah blah.

"This is a new paragraph continuing the dialogue. Blah blah blah."

Notice that there is no closed quote at the end of the first paragraph. That indicates that the second paragraph is also being spoken by the same person.

Personally, I hate long stretches of dialogue. I skim over them, because they're boring. If you must include a lot of talking, break it up using action tags, so that something is happening, beyond just the talking. But don't just include random actions. Make it meaningful. Make it advance the plot in some way, or provide characterization (or both, if possible).

A sample layout might look something like this:

"Talking," he said. Action. "Talking."
Action. "Talking."
"Talking."
"Talking," he said. Action.
Action. "Talking."
"Talking."
"Talking." Action. "Talking."

Work really really hard at idetifying and eliminating superfluous "fluff". That stuff tends to insinuate itself in dialogue more subtly than in narrative. Without an example of your dialogue, it's hard to say much more specific.


caw

Only one thing makes dialogue boring, whether it be long or short, and that's content.

Long stretches of carefully crafted dialogue anywhere including, say, investigations or cross-examinations in a court case can be far from boring. And inserting tags unnecessarily and merely for the sake of having tags can be very distracting.

==Orianna2000;9053164]Personally, I hate long stretches of dialogue. I skim over them, because they're boring. If you must include a lot of talking, break it up using action tags, so that something is happening, beyond just the talking. But don't just include random actions. Make it meaningful. Make it advance the plot in some way, or provide characterization (or both, if possible).

A sample layout might look something like this:

"Talking," he said. Action. "Talking."
Action. "Talking."
"Talking."
"Talking," he said. Action.
Action. "Talking."
"Talking."
"Talking." Action. "Talking."

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Bufty said:

Long stretches of carefully crafted dialogue anywhere including, say, investigations or cross-examinations in a court case can be far from boring. And inserting tags unnecessarily and merely for the sake of having tags can be very distracting.

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I wholeheartedly agree with the last sentence, which is why I specified that action tags should have meaning--not just random actions, but something that advances plot, adds characterization, or both. So long as the tags relay important information, they serve a useful purpose.

As for long chunks of uninterrupted dialogue, I find those hard to read regardless of content. Same for long paragraphs. If there's nowhere to rest the eye, it's a strain. My mind interprets this as "boring" and so I skim forward, looking for some breaks in the dialogue or exposition. It could just be me, though.