and description with
both. Dialogue should no more be written pages at a time than should
description, and if a great deal of speech must be transcribed en bloc,
it should be broken up to some extent by descriptive touches and even by
narration more detailed than that part of the story naturally calls for.

The next consideration is to make the people of a story talk naturally.
The necessity has affiliations with the necessity that the speech of any
person be made characteristic, for dialogue is an efficient aid in the
portrayal of character. The writer must make each person talk like a
human being, even if not like some particular human being. Good, nervous
dialogue will be full of elisions, mere exclamations, unfinished
sentences, gaps that a reader will bridge readily for himself. He will
be skilled in the business, for that is the kind of talk addressed to
him every day. In more sedate and leisurely ages, if we may judge from
the tales then written, people could frame a sentence on the lips, but
it is a lost art now. To be "literary" in transcribing speech is to
invoke almost certain failure. "Literary" dialogue usually is ruinous. A
reader's interest may survive stilted and affected narrative or
descriptive writing, for most readers have read so much of such writing
that it is almost expected, but stilted and affected dialogue will kill
interest once and for all. In narrative there is something behind the
word for the reader, even in description there is a faint something, but
in dialogue there is nothing at all. The word is the word; if it fails,
the failure is total.

Yet it will not do to be quite literal in transcribing speech. If the
speech of real life is broken and fragmentary, it is also impossibly
wordy and purposeless. The lawyer who has spent weary hours in reading
transcripts of testimony knows the fact to his cost. The writer of
fiction has not space to set down with minute accuracy just what his
people probably would have said during the progress of the story; he
must counterfeit the auditory impression of real speech by eliding and
leaving sentences unfinished; but this mechanically broken and abrupt
speech must have the purpose and direction which is wanting in real
speech. The characters must not only talk naturally; they must say
certain definite things and convey definite and necessary information,
directly or by implication. There is little need to emphasize here the
necessity that the writer h