Is dialogue in a novel necessary, or just padding?

I can usually tell the story I want to in less than 10,000 words. I'd really like to accomplish writing a novel and I have a complex idea I want to use and explore, but I am worried I won't need 75,000 words to tell it.

Most popular novels are chock full of dialogue, and I find it easy to write. I'd feel guilty about padding out a story when I could easily paraphrase or summarise a conversation though. Is dialogue necessary?

Answer

Since the author’s voice in a novel can communicate both the characters' actions and directly relate their state of mind, there is no fundamental need for novels to contain dialogue. But your question also hinted at story length and a fondness for economy in writing, which I think is a good thing. The path to reaching larger stories is not filling them with padding (material which serves only to take up space). I’ve belonged to a number of writer’s groups and have found that budding novel writers often view dialogue as extraneous because they don’t understand how it works.

In screenwriting (my hobby) story must be conveyed exclusively with character actions and dialogue. Metaphors, literary style, overt exposition, and character thoughts are all off limits. This forces great economy on a story. A typical two hour film script only contains about 20,000 words. The point here is, screenwriting forces a writer to use dialogue to convey story. Good dialogue can do a lot.

When members of my writer’s group, unaccustomed to dialogue, attempted to employ dialogue in their stories; it typically accomplished nothing. The problem invariably arose from the same two issues: lack of subtext and conflict in their dialogue.

Every effective piece of dialogue in a film will have something going on below the surface of the conversation (all is not what it appears). Overtly, a conversation might involve a protagonist making small talk with a security guard, but in actuality, the protagonist is attempting to con her way into the building. This is subtext. Screenwriter’s call dialogue without subtext, “on the nose writing.”

Since drama is conflict, the use of dialogue in storytelling requires that it contain and advance character conflict. So even if an exchange of dialogue is small and focused, it must contain it’s own conflict. Continuing the example above, the security guard suspects he’s being conned, so he subtly attempts to learn more about the protagonist who of course doesn’t wish to be discovered. Now the dialogue contains both subtext and conflict.

If you want to learn more about dialogue learn from the best, pick up some books on screenwriting or playwriting.