Dialogue, Part Three

Abandon all soapboxing, ye who enter here.

This post is part of the Write With Me series. For more like this, check out the writing your novel page.

I could go on about dialogue forever and a day, but at risk of keeping us mired in it for too long, the following focus points will be our last in this run of posts on dialogue.

Soapboxes Are For Soap, Not Speeches

Fortunately, this is not something I run into all that often as a beta reader, but it's still worth addressing as it pops up just often enough to be problematic.

Not all literature has to work an angle, so to speak, but more power to you if you can craft an engaging work of fiction that also makes a reader consider their personal or political convictions. While attempting to do so, though, it can become tempting to have characters act as a mouthpiece for the author's opinions, which can, in the worst cases, lead to actually three-hour long diatribes like the one featured in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

Where these speeches are concerned though: no one cares. Seriously. Be deft, not daft. Having your protagonist go on a journey of self-discovery that has them question their beliefs can be done deftly. Beating your readers over the head with a hundred pages of monologue, however, is absolutely daft. We're here for fiction, not a faculty congress.

If you're reading your first draft and finding paragraph after paragraph of uninterrupted monologue (putting in occasional beats for your speaker to wipe sweat from their brow or adjust their tie doesn't count as an interruption), you'll lose readers in a hurry if you don't take care of that during editing.

So check your text—are there places where characters are ranting and raving to themselves out loud just to prove a point? Is there a way this could be better presented via actual dialogue (not monologue), their actions, or the plot as a whole? If so, I recommend you give those other methods a shot. No one wants their readers' shoes to become projectiles.