The five patterns below are described by mechanism rather than surface, so that the remedy follows from the cause. Each ends with a published work that commits the fault and succeeds, because a pattern that is sometimes right has to be diagnosed rather than banned. The Reference chapter’s full catalogue adds seven more: the static-status exchange, the maid-and-butler opening, the name in every line, the attribution fault, the therapeutic exchange, the speech that answers a question nobody asked, and the one-engined exchange.
As you know, Bob
Symptom. Characters tell each other what both already know so that the reader can overhear: As you know, our father left the shop to the three of us.
Mechanism. The maxim of quantity is flouted upward with no motive in the fiction, so the reader, who computes implicatures without choosing to, computes the only one available: the author needs me to know this. The information may be necessary; the delivery is what fails.
Remedy. Adding a plausible reason for the conversation does not help, because plausibility is not what is missing; cost is. Give the fact to someone who does not want to say it, give the need to someone who already suspects part of it, or let it arrive incomplete. Where none of these is available, the fact belongs in narration.
Exception. The naive listener, who needs what she is told. Janice Hallett’s crime novel The Appeal (2021) is told entirely in emails, messages and documents, which a senior lawyer passes to two law students, Femi Hassan and Charlotte Holroyd, with no account of the case, asking them to work out what really happened. Because the students, and the reader with them, start from nothing, the correspondents inside the documents never have to brief each other. The arrangement descends from Nelly Dean telling Lockwood the history of Wuthering Heights, and its standing cost is the same: the listeners must be made interesting in their own right.
The ventriloquist exchange
Symptom. Every character reasons, jokes and speaks in the author’s voice. Each line sounds right, and the exchange fails the transcript test on every line.
Mechanism. Writers hear dialogue in their own inner voice, which has one vocabulary and one rhythm. In Bakhtin’s terms the novel’s stratified social languages collapse into one position, and the form’s main resource is lost. The fault survives line-editing indefinitely, because it is in no single line.
Remedy. Structural, not lexical: a different average sentence length, a different relation to questions and a different default subtext mechanism for each principal, then the transcript test again.
Exception. Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote some twenty novels in which parents, children, servants and tyrants all speak the same lucid, formal, epigrammatic English, and the uniform register works as a convention of the form, like verse in Racine, so that characters differ by what they are willing to say. An undifferentiated register is a failure when it is unintended and a style when it is declared.
On the nose
Symptom. Text and subtext say the same thing throughout: I’m angry that you lied to me. — I know. I’m afraid of losing you. The variant in which characters explain their own psychology in the book’s terms (I keep pushing you away because of what happened with our father) is the therapeutic exchange.
Mechanism. A fully cooperative line generates no implicature, so the reader has nothing to compute and no work to do, and the line forecloses the exchange it should open. Used everywhere, it also spends the gap-closing move, since a book with no gap has no climactic plainness left.
Remedy. Keep the feeling and remove the statement of it, by substitution through the twelve mechanisms. For the therapeutic version, give the analysis to another character as an accusation, which its subject can refuse: a diagnosis offered by an enemy is contestable, and the same diagnosis offered by its subject is a verdict.
Exception. Dostoevsky’s characters say what they think at enormous length, Marmeladov delivering his own moral autopsy to a stranger in a tavern and Raskolnikov confessing to Sonya, in novels of great psychological depth. They are still not transparent, because what they say is not the truth about them but their most forceful self-account, offered under pressure to a hearer they are trying to move. The gap in Dostoevsky lies between what is said and what is the case, and self-analysis is dramatic when it is a move and inert when it is a report.
The tennis match
Symptom. Quick, clever back-and-forth with energy in every line and no throughline. It is entertaining in isolation and forgotten a page later.
Mechanism. Each turn does one thing, which is to be good, and the shape is an oscillation rather than a trajectory. The signature is that the turns could be reshuffled without loss.
Remedy. Move three turns and see whether anything breaks; then cut to the turns that could not be moved and rebuild around them.
Exception. The opening of The Social Network (David Fincher, written by Aaron Sorkin, 2010) is some nine script pages of rapid exchange in a bar between Mark Zuckerberg and Erica Albright, in which Mark jumps between the number of people in China with genius IQs, his own SAT score and Harvard’s final clubs, and Erica tells him that he says two things at once and she cannot tell which she is meant to be aiming at. It reads at first as a tennis match. It is not one, because both players want something (he wants her to recognise his standing; she wants not to be condescended to), and because the rally ends in a reversal: she breaks up with him, and her parting speech, that girls will not dislike him for being a nerd but for being an asshole, closes the gap the whole scene has kept open. The tennis match becomes structural when the reader can see what the players are playing for.
Phonetic dialect
Symptom. Non-standard speech rendered by respelling: apostrophes for dropped consonants, eye-dialect such as wuz, dense orthography sustained for pages.
Mechanism. Three problems usually conflated. Respelling is read more slowly, so long passages turn reading into decipherment. Eye-dialect records no difference of sound at all, since wuz is how everyone says was, and so records only that the speaker is not the standard. And where one group’s speech is respelled and another’s is not, the unmarked group is placed at the centre of the book’s language. The rule against the practice grew partly out of a correct perception of that asymmetry, but it has often fallen hardest on writers representing their own communities.
Remedy. Carry dialect in syntax, idiom and vocabulary rather than in spelling, with at most a light orthographic marker.
Exception. Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (2020), set in Glasgow in the 1980s and winner of that year’s Booker Prize, is narrated in standard English and gives its dialogue in Glaswegian Scots. The marking falls on the whole community, not on one group within it; the book’s centre of value is inside the marked speech; and Stuart has said that in James Kelman’s Booker-winning novel of 1994 he first saw his own people and their dialect on the page. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is the older case of the same structure. Phonetic dialect fails when it marks a speaker as a departure from a standard the book itself embodies, and succeeds when the narration does not stand above the speech.
See also: the Reference failure patterns, with a persistence note for each pattern and a table from symptom to mechanism; the diagnostic tests.