No, not the musical group (and I apologize if your earworm is now one of their songs!) – the writing advice: Avoid talking heads.
A quick definition: talking heads refers to scenes that are almost entirely dialogue, often without attribution.
Is it good advice? Well, I don’t know – Hemingway made a virtue of talking heads in “Hills Like White Elephants,” after all.
“But! I’m not/you’re not Hemingway!”
Very true – and honestly, I don’t want to be. First, I like being female. Second, I’ve been to Key West, and I don’t want to live there.
“I meant, your writing isn’t as good as Hemingway’s! He could get away with it!”
Ah. Yeah. Now we’re at the heart of the problem with this advice and with so many other nuggets of “wisdom” when it comes to writing advice – it’s over simplified and effectively meaningless as a result.
All writing advice is meant to help a writer write a better story. (We’ll avoid the discussion of what “better” means in this instance; it’s irrelevant to the matter at hand.)
Hemingway wrote a good (if not great; opinions differ) story in “Hills,” while completely demolishing that trope/shibboleth/rule, so what gives?
In a nutshell – Hemingway kept it simple (two speakers only, properly paragraphed/separated to indicate changes of speaker) and did not confuse the reader.
Ah! We’re on to something!
He didn’t confuse the reader.
Honestly, if there’s one commandment of writing advice, it’s Thou Shalt Not Confuse Thy Reader. (Honestly, for a long time, I thought that was the only commandment. Lately, I’m thinking there’s another: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thy Reader, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
Used badly, talking heads can confuse the reader if they can’t tell who’s speaking at any given time – for example, if there are more than two people in the discussion and there’s no obvious way to tell them apart. Used well, though – you get “Hills.”
I think the advice started with the advent of movies and television: actors are on the screen doing things while they talk because watching two people sit around talking is, well, boring. (Yep: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thy Reader – or, in this case, viewer.)
But visual fiction is different from printed fiction, and the standards and practices of one don’t always translate well to the other. “Avoid talking heads” is one of those that don’t, in my opinion.
What we want to do as writers is tell a compelling story, whatever that entails.
Sometimes, that means lush description. Sometimes, that means sharp, snappy dialogue which would be disrupted by anything other than dialogue tags.
When is which? Haven’t a clue – there can’t be a hard and fast rule because every writer is different, and every story that writer tells is different. What works for one won’t necessarily work for another.
What I would suggest is avoiding too many filler action phrases, because those can be distracting. Very distracting. Kick-the-reader-out-of-the-story distracting, even.
Instead, if the story feels like it needs more than simple dialogue
, think about focusing on the viewpoint character’s reactions to what’s going on. Is the conversation making thon angry? Happy? Frustrated? Thoughtful?
Give the reader the character’s reactions and let us get to know the character through them, because readers read for character more than they do anything else.
