Readers don't trust dialogue.
This one I learned the hard way.
When I first started writing novels, I was under the impression that the best writing was like a screenplay, all dialogue. Everything out in the open. So, I set out to write just that. I put everything into dialogue. I would figure out what the character wanted or was thinking. Then, I would find a way to have him speak this thought aloud.
Back then, I had two friends reading my work—the same two who set me right about senses. When I finished a chapter, I would send it to them, and, invariably, they would write back and ask (along with a request for more sense impressions), “What is he thinking?”
To which, I would stare at the page in absolute puzzlement and then, gesturing at it wildly, cry out, “But I just told you what he was thinking! He said it out loud!”
Then, one day, it struck me.
They did not believe him.
No matter what I had the character say. Unless I did something to indicate in the text what his opinion was—unless I showed them his thoughts—they did not know if he was telling the truth.
They did not know if his happiness was true or feigned. They did not know if he agreed with his words or was just saying them to be polite. They did not know if he actually liked the guy he was talking to or was secretly wishing the bloke would take a long walk off a short pier.
No matter how much of his heart the character poured into his dialogue, it never occurred to them that this was also what he was thinking.
Modern writers often are led astray by television and movies. They have scripts, right? They just speak out loud with very few voiceovers, right? So we can do that in a book, right?
Wrong.
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