I was conducting a public speaking workshop in Thailand not that long ago. And one of the students, Samantha said, TJ, what's really the most important part of telling a story? And I said, Samantha, it's the dialogue, you got to have dialogue. And she said, Well, why do I need that? Can I just be the narrator? Can I just explain it?
And it's, well, Samantha, you could but guess what? It's not as interesting. And she said, Why? And timeout. You see what I'm doing there. I'm actually using dialogue, to talk about dialogue.
What most people do is they want to just explain things as the narrator. If I were doing the exact same thing, but as the narrator, I would say recently, I had a workshop in Thailand, a student of mine, Samantha, asked what was the most important part about stories and I explained explained that it was telling stories, she inquired further, and I see how boring That is when you're the narrator, everything comes out more monotone. Everything comes out sort of playing, your speed becomes more consistent. Your tone is more consistent. It's, frankly, more boring. When you're doing dialogue.
It's more concrete, you're actually saying what you said to the person what you said back. And this creates more variety with your voice. It naturally puts in pauses, it's easier to use the full range of your voice without even trying, you're more likely to change your voice to be more likely other person you were talking with. So it creates tremendous variety, makes it more interesting, puts in more pauses. And typically again, without even being aware of it, your body moves as you're one character and the other, your body moves more. That makes you look more confident.
Takes up a little more time, which is a good thing. It slows down the onslaught. I mean, how would you like to get to a movie that had no dialogue? How would you like to read a novel and it's just the narrator the whole time, it would be so much harder to be interesting and engaging. So we all use dialogue all the time when telling stories about something interesting that happened to us. He can't believe what happened to me.
I'm driving down the highway and someone rolls down the window. It says, Hey, buddy, you've got that's dialogue. Much more interesting than saying, I was driving down the highway and I noticed a motorist had rolled down the window and was telling me the following message. here How boring that is. You want to spice up your story, you need dialogue. That is virtually impossible in my experience to put in dialogue and not make a story more interesting.
So Don't leave it out.