Lately we’ve been reading a lot of conversations in clients’ books that seem to be floating in space. These disembodied voices leave us with an odd feeling like we have landed in the midst of some fantasy novel in which the characters simply don’t have bodies, but float around indistinguishably in space as pure consciousness or something like that. Trying to follow the thread of the story makes us wonder briefly about our state of mind.

But then we snap out of it and begin to think about what is missing from the writing.

Here is an example of what we are talking about. From Ann Beattie’s MY LIFE STARRING DARA FALCON, this is a conversation between the glamorous Dara and her humdrum friend, Jean:

“What’s the next act for Dara and Tom? That’s what I don’t want to get to.”
“It doesn’t seem entirely within your control.”
“It hurts like a physical pain. I think I am going to lose him.”
“You won’t lose him.
“I’ve set you up. What else can you say? ‘Yes, you are sure to lose him’?”
“I don’t say things because I am set up. I didn’t say that because it was what you wanted to hear.”

Beattie is known for writing wonderful dialogue. But even she does not rely on the dialogue alone to carry her scenes. Her characters make faces and have voices that show their emotions. They have bodies. Below is the dialogue the way it actually appears in the book:

“What’s the next act for Dara and Tom? That’s what I don’t want to get to.”
“It doesn’t seem entirely within your control,” I said.
She looked at me, and her eyes started to widen, but then they narrowed again. “It hurts like a physical pain,” she said. “I think I am going to lose him.”
“You won’t lose him,” I said, though I had nothing to base that on.
“I’ve set you up,” Dara said, “What else can you say? ‘Yes, you are sure to lose him’?”
“I don’t say things because I am set up,” I said. But my voice wasn’t steady. I did, indeed, say things because they were expected of me; all too often, I certainly did say whatever was expedient to reinforce the status quo. I tried to speak again, to tell her the truth. But what was the truth? Tom was going to be the one who decided their future. “I didn’t say that because it was what you wanted to hear,” I said, trying to sound indignant.

When you are on a roll and whipping out your story, you probably see it vividly in your head, all of it, the way the protagonist tilts his head, the way the villain shades her eyes, the down of the old lady’s cheek. Why stop to write all that down? You may not stop but you better go back and do so because the reader is lost in space without that basic information.