straight up this makes me want to write a short story where all the characters are animals. like, cats or something. not talking cats, just cats navigating the real world without understanding speech or speaking words at all
Wait, I have an idea.
Story where everyone is telepaths but nobody can use spoken language in their telepathy. All dialogue is descriptions of mental images, emotions, and raw concepts being exchanged. Quotations are sending memories, making flashbacks part of conversation.
I will annoy Booktok.
Ah, but then they skip to the end and some will question "where is the dialogue?" only to discover that the dialogue, the exchange of ideas between characters, was everywhere.
But 90% of the readers will call it bad and unremarkable, ten thousand words of nothing.
They will not survive.
This has got me thinking about the challenge of expressing explicitly nonlinguistic communication through language... Maybe illustrations, music etc in place of dialogue, to fully convey there is no language here? Seems like a cool multimedia project.
As a reader I’ve found stream of consciousness type descriptions fairly effective at conveying that sort of thing but it would very definitely be a cool project to lean into it!
My current novel which is a WIP at just over 20k words so far has huge sections of the main character silently stalking and killing his enemies with little to no dialogue for his character at all.
short stories without dialogue are pretty common. i've written some and read many. it's just a more forgiving format for being experimental. but i suspect this would have 0 impact on bookfluencer types because short stories don't count toward your read list for the year.
It’s a great clue they take no care in anything they create either. I’ve never written anything of length publicly because I agonize over every word!! because every word matters!!!!
In my first chapter of my current book, I think there are ten whole lines of dialogue as we follow POV MC through their morning. More if you count what they’re thinking, but I feel these people would skip even that.
Comments
Story where everyone is telepaths but nobody can use spoken language in their telepathy. All dialogue is descriptions of mental images, emotions, and raw concepts being exchanged. Quotations are sending memories, making flashbacks part of conversation.
I will annoy Booktok.
But 90% of the readers will call it bad and unremarkable, ten thousand words of nothing.
They will not survive.
It's a pretty good exercise!