The Book of Dialogue: How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry

by Lewis Turco

Originally published in 1989, this revised and expanded edition focuses on the art and craft of writing effective dialogue in fiction, cinema, television, drama, radio, and poetry. Turco’s unique technique teaches by he creates a Socratic dialogue as the form of the book itself. Says the author, "Plato wrote lies in order to tell the truth. That’s what a fiction writer does and has always done." The book covers how • Write dialogue that is believable as conversation―carefully selected, paced, and organized. • Break up dialogue at strategic places with action, replies, scene-setting and other elements vital to telling your story. • Balance dialogue and other story elements • Dramatize conflict through dialogue. • Use dialogue to lay the groundwork for upcoming events in the story.

Genres: Writing

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Lewis Putnam Turco was an American poet, teacher, and writer of fiction and non-fiction. Turco was an advocate for Formalist poetry (or New Formalism) in the United States.

Reviews

[Timons Esaias · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bought this book as preparation for teaching a workshop on Dialogue, and I finished it, but O Bragi, O Thoth, it was a pain. I constantly tell my students not to load dialogue with exposition. So what is this book? 185 pages of expository dialogue.

The stunt of writing a book about dialogue as a dialogue sounds clever, but in practice it is a drag. I commented by page 21 that it was already a slog; made worse by the dialogue being full of the things I tell my students not to do: dull beats, saidisms, adverbs, phony diction, speechifying. He uses poetry for monologue examples, and it's his own, old-fashioned, thin, often rhyming poems. He misuses the verb careen, and yes, there's a grimace.

I know that this book has had several editions, and been translated, and that Turco has numerous helpful works to his name (two of which I teach from, and advise using), but this thing is a scam, a wreck, and a delusion. NOT RECOMMENDED.

Firstly, it's heavily padded. Instead of giving us dialogue examples focusing on just the dialogue, we get whole stories that have pages of no dialogue. Who wrote these stories? Mostly Turco. Are they any good? Not really, and they were published in his college's student magazine. Of course they have good elements, but again are full of things I have to train out of my own students.

A specific note I made on page 23 sums up my general negative attitude to the book as a whole. We've had a series of Turco poems, on the excuse that we're illustrating monologue. The last one is labeled as an "Envoy" to the series, and is not a monologue. I wrote in the white space, "The envoy is not a monologue. This is B.S. and it's padding."

There are good bits of advice, and some useful items, like when he gives the screenplay version and the prose story version and the stage play version of the same story. That can be worth studying. He properly points out the major strength of prose fiction (page 6): "The fiction writer can get inside his or her characters' heads..." Another point (26) "Adjectives and adverbs are the mark of the amateur."
On 33-34 there's a good example from Isherwood, showing how to reveal that a conversation is boring without making the reader suffer through it all.

There's some themist claptrap on page 42 (the kind of thing you get from folks who teach literature but don't actually have to sell it). There's a two-page aside on plot and atmosphere, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with dialogue. On page 52 we get a four-page story with no dialogue, in a book about dialogue. Hmmm. On page 58 there's an excellent point: "They should avoid boring chat about the obvious and the trivial. Sometimes characters ought not to reply to one another directly, but obliquely or not at all., each one talking about his own preoccupation, and the like."

Later there's a six-page short story that I labeled "Another slab of padding, with limited teaching value." Later still, there's a story that begins with 4.5 paragraphs of narrative, again raising the question of why we need this in a book on dialogue.

On page 98 he makes the valid point that you can get away with dialect more easily in a humor piece than a serious one. He raises the right questions about uses of dialect, but I didn't come out of that section feeling I'd been given real guidance. It is a muddy question, it must be admitted.

He properly calls one bit of example dialogue boring, and explains why: "Because there's no dramatic tension in it. There's no story being told; there's no conflict, not even a protagonist..."

Just a few pages from the end he starts a "summing up" which makes several good points (not all of them raised earlier) but then there's a relapse to padding, including a whole page of "example" text that has no dialogue.

There are some fine flecks of ore in this one, but it's mostly dross. I really don't know why it is still in print.

[Jenny · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only read two chapters since it was required reading for class, but heads up to prospective readers: contains outdated, ableist ideas about those on the autism spectrum, and use of the r-slur to describe them.

[Jennifer Worrell · Rating 1 out of 5]

NO. This is the most irritating self-help book on dialogue. It's for people who can't afford a class but want to do things the hard way. It's hard to follow, written all in dialogue with a character that doesn't exist, and it includes excerpts that go on forever. It's the writing instruction book equivalent of the William Shunn manuscript format guide (http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html) I wanted to throw it through a wall. Here's the best thing I learned, a nice, succinct definition:
Dialogue is natural conversation tightly compressed.

Boom.

[Raelee Carpenter · Rating 3 out of 5]

This tome is rather high-minded, concept-driven, and technical. I would not suggest it to writers of genre fiction as most of the material is not applicable in a practical way in that field.

[Eric Wynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a writer, I am gleaning some new ideas for my work from this book. It has held my intrests so far, and I continue to press forward looking for those golden nuggest of knowledge that are hidden among the pages.

[L.M. Elm · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thought the use of Socratic method was a little too over the top for me. I found my self cringing at his narrator. There are better books about dialogue out there. This one just isn't one of them.