The "Minimal Dialogue" Philosophy in Fiction

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In my writing classes we're told to keep dialogue minimal and have every bit of dialogue do more than one thing. Having superfluous conversations is frowned upon. Every line of dialogue is supposed to do more than one thing at once.

I disagree.

I LIKE knowing things about the characters that have nothing to do with the story. I don't like automatically knowing what pieces of information will be significant--when you know countless bits of information about a character, you don't know what will come into play in the plot later. More importantly, I think of characters as "more real" if I know a lot of things about them that I don't "need" to know. And if I think that they're more real, then I find I care about them more. And when their life is at risk later, then it matters so much more than it would have if I'd just known what was significant. I understand that it speeds up the pace, but if everything was about being as fast as possible then Steinbeck wouldn't have spent a page and a half describing a turtle walk across the road in "Grapes of Wrath." THAT is what I call self indulgent, not seeing the characters that matter as real!

Then again, in what we read in my writing classes characters' lives are rarely in danger because that'd count as "genre fiction" like sci-fi fantasy or horror, which the creative writing department ALSO frowns upon. (Virtually everything I like is sci-fi, fantasy, or horror.)

What are your thoughts on this?

Hemingway would have laughed his a** off at this. But what did he know? He only won a Nobel or something.

I know literary critics like that there be "layers" of meaning in every word of a story - it gives them a reason for existing. What they hate is coming up with fabuluous multidimensional interpretations of something only to have the writer shrugs and go "Well, I didn't write that." The most infamous incident of this is Catcher in the Rye - Salinger insisted there's no imagery, no "metatext," or anything of the sort, but does that stop the critics and academics? No wonder Salinger hid himself away from the world.

One ironic thing that could be gleaned from this is, perhaps most writers ought to be discouraged from writing dialogie, because most writers can't writer dialgoue to save their lives. My, that's a rather Flannery O'Connor thing to say. LOL. Anyhow, seriously, I'm sure you're heard of people like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer? Heard how great of writers they ae? Can they writer dialogue? Ha hah hah hah!! NO!! !! Their dialogue is atrocious.

I think whomever is spewing this nonsense is thinking he/she is aiding the students to write most meaningful dialogue. But I have two critcism of this:

1) It's cynical is assuming that something that is direct and unidirectional is not meaningful or significant.

2) It's a cheap trick that sounds like it's encouraging the writer to be more creative when in fact it inhibits genuine creativity by saying every word ought to be molded to this one law. Since when has inspiration and genius pandered to homogeneity?

I say this despite the fact that I prefer "mean and lean" writing. I don't like "loitering" words - every word should have a reason for being on the page, period. That's doesn't mean, however, that those words need to do multilayered backflips or other cutesy, trendy tricks to impress people and make my writing seem more important or sophisticated than it is. They just need to be part of the story I'm telling to the reader.

Writing for sci fi, horror and fantasy gets a bad rap because those genres tend to cater to conventions that are often very hackneyed. Putting a character in peril, for example, is one such convention. But that is not to say you can't do really excellent writing in those genres. Just be aware that there are certain things that are OK in these genres that are avoided in other forms of fiction.

I would recommend the book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers - that book gives a lot of really good advice on writing good story, regardless of what kind of fiction you write. It covers what ought to be a writer's real priorities, and that may help you put what you are being taught in this class into a better prespective, as opposed to just feeling antagonized.