Talking heads
A weakness of novice writers – and also pot-boiler novelists with million-dollar publishing deals – is to use dialogue to divulge information. This is sometimes referred to as being expositional or explicatory. It is when characters tell the reader what’s happening or what they intend: how the President is about to press his big red button and unleash Armageddon, or whatever it happens to be. As soon as you burden characters in this way they become authorial mouthpieces, with all their vibrancy and believability draining away. It renders the writing clunky and jarring. If that sounds a bit complicated, all you really need do is watch or read something of poor quality.
Stating the obvious
Not so long ago, before Netflix and Amazon began spending millions on their productions, studios churned out series with reckless abandon – especially in the science fiction genre. Scriptwriters were given little time to pen effective dialogue. To an extent this made sense. After all, most viewers of shows such as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Firefly were tuning in to see gun battles, with a sprinkling of pseudoscience thrown in. Little care was taken with the words. As a consequence the dialogue could be stilted.
Read the admittedly exaggerated example below and see what you think. I would describe these lines as functional but robotic.
‘Captain, we are being attacked by Klingons again. Tell me, what should we do?’
‘You say we are being attacked by Klingons? That is not good. We are
