The Mechanics of Good Dialogue

I once took my car to an insurance evaluator. He walked around it in semi-darkness and immediately told me all the details of every collision I had been involved in. He knew exactly what to look for and how to interpret it.

In the same way you can open a novel in a random page, look at the dialogue, and say with some certitude how well the particular author handles dialogue without even reading the dialogue itself. Good dialogue in a novel can easily be distinguished by its mechanics. Here are three things you have to look for to spot bad dialogue:

a) The emotions of characters are described.
Does the author find it necessary to tell you that John is angry, happy, sad, astonished or surprised after someone said something? Then you are reading bad dialogue. In good dialogue, the author doesn't have to describe the emotions of the characters involved. The words in the dialogue should carry the emotions of the characters to the reader. And the reader will evolve his personal take on the character. Good dialogue allows the reader to feel the speaker's or listener's emotions.

Skyfall—A Highly Distinctive Blend From a Fifty-Year-Old Vintage

Skyfall, the twenty-third James Bond film which started playing this month, has wisely kept the trademarks of the fifty year old series while at the same time invested weight and complexity to its characters and story. The result is not just one of the best Bond films ever made, but a fine movie, period.

When Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, resigned from his job in naval intelligence at the end of the war he promised to his friends that he would “write a spy novel that would be read as literature”. Although Eric Ambler had made this leap before the war, Fleming didn't manage it. Casino Royale, the first James Bond adventure published in 1952, did have a number of interesting characters, but it was closer to pulp than literature. The Bond adventures that followed it did little to close the gap. The cinematic James Bond was even further down the line. His first adventures were a clever mixture of reality and fantasy, but in just a few years reality had gone out the window and given its place to outright male fantasy. The movie Bond was mostly an adult fairy-tale figure who moved on the fine line between absurdity and over the top. There were a couple of small detours towards reality (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, License to Kill) but that's exactly what they were—detours.