Part 7 — Dialogue, exposition, poetry, and dramatic form

A sentence can be correct and vivid and still do nothing. The previous part worked on the sentence as language. This one asks what a sentence is for when a person speaks it in a room, when it carries something the reader needs to know, when it is a line of poetry that stops before the margin does, or when an actor who is not the author has to say it aloud.

Each time, the writer is deciding who is speaking to whom, what the listener will do with it, and what to leave out. Dialogue makes the decision visible, because what a character says, and avoids saying, is the best evidence of what the character wants. In exposition the decision concerns the author’s own voice, and the question is whether the telling changes anything. Poetry takes away scene and plot, so sound, line, and syntax have to do the work a plot would otherwise do. Writing for the stage, the screen, or the ear hands the page to other artists, so every word on it has to be something a voice can speak or a stage or a camera can show.

The order runs speech, information, form, limit, and you can read it straight through. You can also come in by problem:

• Flat dialogue, or characters who are interchangeable: start at 61. It and the three after it are about speech, and about why characters should not be used as funnels for the reader’s information.
• A scene that dies whenever background arrives: start at 64 or 66. Practices 65 and 66 turn to scene, summary, and exposition.
• A story you are moving into a play or a screenplay: Practice 67. Read it before you adapt a single line.
• A poem that reads like a statement with line breaks: 68.
• A draft that feels too comfortable, too long, or too much like your last one: read Practices 69 and 70 together. The first removes habit with a constraint; the second removes slack.

Nothing here assumes a method. A discovery writer often finds a character’s voice by putting two people in a room before knowing what either wants, and may produce pages of idle talk on the way to the line that matters; a planner may chart who knows what in each scene before anyone speaks. The pages that come out of either meet the same tests afterward.

The examples come mostly from public-domain texts. Living and recent writers appear too, mostly in paraphrase, and what we quote from them is a short phrase or a sentence, with the source named. Read the passages when you can.