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Beginners experience a difficulty in deciding when to use dialogue and when to use simple narration. Remember that the aim of the novelist is to tell a story, and to tell it with the greatest economy of means. If the facts to be related can be given more succinctly and forcibly in dialogue, then dialogue should be employed. Sometimes the novelist cannot come to a decision without experimenting in both methods. It is better to use too little dialogue than too much. At specially dramatic points a few lines of dialogue are sometimes of immense value. Beginners often fall into the error of starting a conversation between characters for a certain purpose, and then continuing it after the purpose is achieved, merely because in real life the conversation would not have ended when the purpose was achieved. This is bad art. The novelist’s business is not at all to set down complete portions of real life, but only such fragments as suit his artistic ends. When a conversation has served its purpose, stop it instantly; if advisable you may summarise its conclusion in a few words of narration.

Dialogue in fiction cannot have the fulness of dialogue in life. That is to say, it cannot be entirely realistic. It must be rigorously selected. The novelist will not write down, therefore, what his characters, considered as actual people, probably would have said under the given circumstances. Having discovered for himself what they probably would have said, he will manipulate and compress it so as both to effect his artistic purpose and to deceive the reader into an illusion of reality. The illusion of reality will not be given unless the novelist, while departing from what the characters would have said, is careful to set down nothing but what they could have said. Thus, for a simple example, if he makes a peasant use a five-syllable verb, he may be as ingenious as he likes, but he will destroy the illusion of reality.

In the employment of dialect the novelist should never even approach realistic exactitude. The merest indication of dialectal peculiarity in a spoken sentence should content him. The speech of educated persons is full of small divergences from absolute correctness, but no novelist ever dreams of recording the hundredth part of such divergences. To do so would be to irritate and confuse the reader. In dealing with those more marked eccentricities of speech which constitute dialect, the novelist must exercise a similar discretion.