Is it true that a writer should not begin a chapter with dialogue?—Talkative in Toledo
You know, this is another of those rules that get trotted out periodically to (supposedly) offer aspiring writers a short-cut to stardom. “Never use adverbs!” “Never use dialog tags other than ‘said’!” “Never use passive voice!” “Never use auxiliary verbs!”
They generally have a kernel of truth in them. It IS possible to over do modifiers—adverbs and adjectives alike. It IS a problem when your characters tend to ejaculate their words instead of saying them. Yes, passive voice CAN interfere with clean, strong writing. And, certainly, a plethora of auxiliary verbs can slow down the pace and complicate your sentences needlessly.
But go ahead, jot this down, and stick it up over you desk:
You can do anything in fiction you can get away with. Unfortunately, nobody’s ever gotten away with much.—Flannery O’Connor
Once upon a time (the 1970s) it suddenly became quite popular to start chapters and even novels with dialog:
“Drop the gun!”
“You’ve killed him, Harold!”
“Where’s the bathroom?”
It was considered the ultimate in author invisibility. Writers like Armistead Maupin wrote entire books mostly in dialog, not nearly as competently as the brilliant Ivy Comption-Burnett, either, and readers ate them up.
This was because the younger adults at that time, a massive target market, were the first generation to grow up entirely on radio and television. Their brains had been programmed for dialog.
After several decades of this, backlash set it. Now agents and acquisitions editors are saying, “Enough already! WE’VE READ ALL THE DIALOG.” They haven’t, of course. But sometimes they sure wish they had.
Begin a chapter with dialog ONLY when you need that particular technique to perform one of its signature tasks:
- You need the reader to hear what’s happening before they see because it’s something that will forward the plot better if it’s seen first in context, and you’ve been over-doing the exposition at the end of the last chapter, so you wake the reader up with a switch in technique:
“It’s Aunt Vi’s stethoscope!” - You need to grip the reader with the relationship between these characters first and foremost, and in order to further the plot you have to make a point about the invisibility of the voice:
“Shut up and tell me. My dad’s yelling for me to get off the phone.” - You need this scene to be in total darkness, and you don’t want to slow down the flow of the plotline because you’ve already described the dark at the end of the last chapter:
“Get off me, for crying out loud. I’m going to want that eyeball later.”
You’ll notice all of these reasons involve forwarding the plot. That’s right. You’re not here to look smart. You’re here to tell a story.
DO NOT begin a chapter with dialog just because:
- You’ve been raised on television and that’s the way you’re used to scenes starting. (In movies, the dialog often starts while you’re still looking at the previous scene—this is a transition technique that’s much more clumsy and obvious on the page.)
- You’re too lazy to envision the scene before you try to write it.
- It’s the only tension technique you know.
And if you really want to begin a scene in which characters are talking, but you don’t have a really good reason to begin with the dialog, use a couple of lines of description or action first to flag down your reader’s attention.
They’re pretty quick. They’ll get it.
(UPDATE: Random Chapter-Starting Dialog Award goes to @jefro_net for: “That’s the margarita talking.”)