Last night I had an long, long conversation with my mother, where she did most of the talking. Some things that were upsetting her about life in general needed voicing and acknowledgement. I sat and listened and interjected or questioned where appropriate. It was a conversation that revealed a impressive amount of information about how she thought and felt, how she 'worked' on the inside.

And it occurred to me that this is something you can never do in fiction.

It's not that dialogue is boring - good dialogue can be just as gripping and exciting as any cliffhanger or dramatic scene. But while we might want someone to tell us what they're thinking and what's wrong in real life, in fiction it's incredibly dull. It's like listening to someone that you don't really know tell you about the time they very-nearly tripped over a shopping cart, in excruciating detail. 

Fiction relies on imagination. It's a reciprocal process - to enjoy fiction, you must be willing to use your imagination, exercise it. But the fiction must also feed it - give it something to work with. Which is why 'Show, don't Tell' is perhaps the most-spouted writing advice in the history of any universe ever.

When you Tell, you dump the facts into the reader's brain, bypassing Imagination Central. It gives nothing for their mind to work with, it's just information. The reader's imagination, with nothing to do, wanders off an inspects a thought that had been floating around a while ago, possibly takes it for coffee somewhere, and eventually drags the reader with it.

By Showing, you give hooks for the imagination. It grabs onto snippets and hidden-meanings and spins the story so the reader can 'see' everything, can inhabit the story by including their own experience and assumptions.

So why do the traditional "deep and meaningful"s not work in fiction? Because a D&M conversation is character A telling character B what's wrong, why it's wrong, what they can and can't do to fix it, and how it all makes them feel. 

How to tell without telling

If you want to have this kind of conversation - the kind where you leave it feeling you know the character so much better, that so much has been revealed without losing the reader on the way, there's a simple rule: 

The reader has to work it out themselves. 

The important information goes in the subtext - it's never said out loud, but it shines through the gaps of what is said, and (just as importantly) what isn't said. The gaps, and the fact that the characters are meaning something other than what they're saying (even if the characters themselves don't realise it) are what engage the reader's imagination, gives them the need to figure out what's going on.

Now, I don't mean be obscure or a literary Picasso. Unless you're writing a very particular kind of book, it doesn't pay to cypher everything into a puzzle. But when you're writing a conversation that needs to reveal a character's interior, you need to ask yourself:

1. What is the fact I'm trying to reveal?
   • keep it simple. If it's complex, break it up into smaller facts, and reveal them one at a time, in different ways
2. Now that I know that fact, what can they actually be talking about that I can use to demonstrate this fact?

The answer to 1 and 2 should be different things. How different is up to the needs of circumstance, but if they're the same, you've likely got a problem. And note the emphasis above - this doesn't apply to all conversations, only to those that are designed to shed light on a character's inner self.

Keep it short

Real D&M's go on for hours, circle around, repeat themselves, amble down tangents and inspect navels before returning to the original topic with renewed vigour. Don't. Miles and miles of dialogue are almost universally painful to read (unless you really know what you're doing... and if you think that's you, it's probably not.) Refer to step 1 of above - boil it down to the one thing you're trying to reveal, and keep the conversation only long enough to do its job. 

Don't feel that you have to mimic how people really approach these things - like line-sketching, fiction is much more evocative when there are missing pieces for the mind's eye to fill in.

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