Kerry Allen

Yay! I haven’t been the Editing Police in months!

Today’s infraction: Criminally Bad Dialogue.

Dialogue is not conversation. Dialogue should contain none of the wasted breath and useless babble that those of us in the real world pepper our communication with. (”Hi.” “Hi. How are you?” “Pretty good. You?” “Okay.” “Whatcha doing?” “Not much.” “I have something stuck in my teeth.” “Yeah, I hate it when that happens.” “Okay, see ya later.” “Yeah, bye.”)

I knew I was in trouble when, in the book I was reading, two characters met and promptly sat down to get to know each other better. The following several pages went something like this:

“What kind of music do you like?”

“I like Nirvana.”

“Yeah, it’s amazing how popular that music got after the poor-rich-famous-whiny-crybaby-drug addict-suicide thing. Almost reminds me of somebody else.”

“I also like jazz.”

“Me too! (Insert 5 paragraphs about the history of jazz here)”

“What’s your favorite food?”

“Poached duck, and my favorite beverage is green tea. How about you?”

Bored senseless yet? Wondering how the characters’ CD collections and tastebuds are going to be crucial to Resolving the Big Crisis?

Aw, sorry. This is nothing more than a failed attempt at character development—failed, as there is no character and no development involved, merely a random spew of items to which the reader is expected to assign the appropriate value judgments and get the intended picture of the characters.

Why is this a dangerous technique to employ? Well, my judgment was that these characters have horrible taste in everything, could be making much better of use of their time (which was repeatedly stated to be of the essence), and were boring as hell. I somehow doubt that was the intended picture, particularly since the result was me adding this book to the Too Awful To Finish/Never Buy This Author Again stack, which I assume is not a desirable thing if you’re this author or her publisher.

The verdict: Guilty, guilty, guilty.

The sentence: Permanent exile from my reading future (and be thankful you’re in America—in a less diplomatic country, I’d cut out your characters’ tongues).