The word dialogue is used for three things: the words inside the quotation marks, the technique of representing speech, and a structural unit of the novel. They fail in different ways, and this chapter is about the third.
The working definition
A dialogue exchange is a passage of spoken interaction between two or more characters, each pursuing a want through what they say, in which the balance of information, power or feeling between the speakers is measurably different at the end from what it was at the start. Four parts of the definition carry weight. Spoken interaction means that the unit is the interaction, not the speech: a page of one character talking at another who does not answer is a speech, which obeys other rules. Each pursuing a want means both sides. An exchange in which only one party wants anything is an interrogation or a briefing, which are legitimate forms with one engine, and the diagnostic tests will find them. Through what they say means that the talk is the instrument; if two people chat while one of them picks the other’s pocket, the talk is a layer of texture over a different unit. Measurably different is the value-shift test of The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1) at a smaller scale, and the change may be small: a fact has passed, a point has been conceded, a form of address has altered.
Scale
Three scales are in use, because they answer different questions. The turn, one speaker’s uninterrupted contribution, answers what does this line do that the last did not? The exchange, a bounded run of turns on one matter with a beginning and an outcome, answers has anything moved? The dialogue scene, a whole scene whose action is talk, answers does this scene earn its pages? This chapter treats the middle unit as primary, because a single turn is too small to shift a value and a whole scene can hide a failing exchange behind a working one. An exchange ends at a change of topic, a change of participants or the arrival of the outcome it was pursuing. A rule of thumb for revision follows: the exchange begins at the first turn that could not be cut without loss and ends at the last such turn. Most drafted exchanges carry a few turns of approach at the front and a couple of retreating turns at the back, which are the writer’s runway, not the reader’s requirement.
Conversation and exchange
The distinction a reviser most needs is between conversation and exchange. Conversation is a social activity whose function is often to maintain a relationship rather than to transfer anything. Much of it is what the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, writing in 1923, called phatic communion (from the Greek phatos, spoken): talk whose content hardly matters, because its purpose is to confirm that the channel is open and the relationship intact. Greetings, the weather and the ritual enquiry after health are important socially and nearly inert in a novel. An exchange is conversation under load. The difference is not one of subject, since two people can discuss the weather in an exchange and their own divorce in a conversation; it is whether anything is being contested. A conversation ends when its participants are done, and an exchange ends when someone gets something or is refused. Novels need both; the error is mistaking one for the other.
Adjacent terms
A monologue is sustained speech by one character, and the interior monologue, which represents thought rather than speech, belongs to The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13). Reported speech renders talk in the narrator’s words (she said she would not come) and is the compression any revision of an exchange must consider. Free indirect speech renders speech or thought in the narrator’s grammar and the character’s diction, unquoted; it is the boundary case, where narration and speech meet. Attribution, or the tag, identifies a speaker: he said, she asked. An action beat is an action set between turns in place of a tag: Elena held out her hand. The Reference text calls this simply a beat. This book reserves beat for the smallest unit of change in a scene, as The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1) defines it, and for the six named functions of Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2), and calls the action between turns an action beat. Subtext, the want, fear or withheld fact beneath a line, is defined with its mechanism in The Mechanism.
What the chapter leaves to others
The representation of thought is left to The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13), and the chapter treats thought only where the narration uses it to expose the gap between what a character says and what she means. Plays and screenplays are used for comparison, but the model is built for prose fiction, in which a narrator stands between speaker and reader; that narrator is the largest formal difference between novelistic and dramatic dialogue, and much advice imported from screenwriting leaves it out. The linguistics of dialect is a field of its own; its representation on the page is treated here as a craft and ethical problem. A chapter break placed inside an exchange belongs to The Chapter Break (Chapter 6).
See also: the Reference definitions, with the tables of delimitations and adjacent terms; the consolidated glossary.