Have you ever read a book where the author doesn't have the characters speak for pages? Because they're either not with other people or are in the throes of battle and don't have the chance to speak? What are your thoughts on these authors? What are your thoughts on the books? Do you get bored quickly without dialogue? Or can the prose or situation in which talking is omitted be fascinating enough to keep you turning those pages where no talking goes on?

These are the books I've read where this happens and I kept reading because they were so interesting; The Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop and the Black Dagger Brotherhood by J.R. Ward

What are your comments?

Like anything else, it depends how it's done and how good the writing is.  One particular case I can think of that I didn't like is how in Isabel Allende's Zorro, there's not much in the way of dialogue.  Readers instead just get told the gist of what someone has said.  I found this to be rather distracting. 

Somebody on their own, or in a position where they're not able to have dialogue, however...again, it's all in the execution.  But it wouldn't be an automatic turnoff.

It's hard to pull off. If we're in the character's POV s/he has to have opinions and thoughts. But overall, to have the situation you pose the character must be alone. If they're with someone, and interacting with them, but at the same time not talking, it would be all telling—informing not entertaining. And it's always a bad idea to have only one actor on stage for long periods of time.

You didn't say why you asked, but assuming that you did so because you noticed that you had that situation in your own writing, I'd suggest you look through that section and mark every line in which the narrator is explaining the action, the situation, the backstory, and the character's motivations to the reader. They are your POV breaks.

One of my best short stories, and best received by my readers, has exactly two short lines of dialogue, one by each of the two characters. They are important lines. They might seem less so, if the characters spent the three days of the story talking about stuff.

Whether there is quote-marked dialogue on the page or no, Kurt Vonnegut reminds us in his "Eight Rules For Writing Fiction" that: 

Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. 

If your sentences do this the narrative is propelled forward and you will carry the reader along with you.

Having said that, dialogue does help a text read faster. 

A tangential thought: Many of the writers I enjoy write a more poetic (Bradbury, Poe, Clark Aston Smith, Robert E. Howard) or scientifically-precise (Lovecraft) line of prose than the post-modernist norm. I have been in the company of philistines who have objected that these writers violate Vonnegut's rule referenced above, as does any writer who dares append a forward, prologue* or epilogue to their tales. To which I have always responded: Nonsense! It's a matter of personal artistic aesthetics and sensibility. If you, the writer, need x amount of lines to fully establish a particular mood, convey critical world-building detail and/or choose to open or close your tale with a thought-provoking prologue and/or epilogue, do it.

Or go pages—even chapters—the entire book, if that's your pleasure—without dialogue.

Rules are ever and always merely guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules, as Dwight V. Swain, in Techniques of the Selling Writer, acknowledges:

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          To write successfully, you have to have the nerve to look at something in a new way and say, "This fascinates me. Look what I've done with it!"

. . . other people may see it from a different angle. Whereupon, out of disagreement may spring disapproval.

. . . rules start from the wrong end: with restriction; with form; with mechanics; with exhortation about things you should and shouldn't do. 

         Where should you start, then?

         With feeling. Your own feeling.

         A story is like a car that runs on emotion. The author's feeling is the gasoline in its engine. Take away its fuel, and even the shiniest, chrome-plated literary power plant is reduced to so much scrap iron.

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Forgive me if I've prattled on over-long.

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*Dean Koontz has observed—it does give one pause [close paraphrase from his Writing Popular Fiction]: "I have never read a novel that opened with a prologue that needed it."

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 10/26/2014, 12:09 PM--