Writers are often tempted to plant too much information in character dialogues. They do this because they feel that such information is necessary for the reader to know, or that they could be giving too much information in the narrative so that putting it in the dialogue will give balance. If you do this, read out your character’s dialogue and you’ll find it sounds unbelievable. Rather than reading what sounds like normal speech, it sounds more like an infomercial.

While the writer feels that such information is necessary to push the story forward, characters must not sound mechanical. Moreover, readers might feel that the writer is talking down to them.

Consider this planted information in dialogue: A young man is having dinner with his fiancée. He is worried and has not touched his food. He feels uneasy as he wipes the sweat on his forehead and he makes a confession:

     “Alexa, there’s something you need to know. Now that we’ll be getting married on the twenty-fifth of June, and that we just found out that you’re pregnant when you showed me those two plus signs in your pregnancy test, and that I have just bought a cozy little mansion through house loan financing payable in ten years, I want to tell you that I might lose my job, because a female co-worker of mine, Angela, whom you’ve met before at a cocktail party, has filed a sexual harassment case against me.”

The man’s dialogue has excessive information, most of it unnecessary. Alexa knows most of what he’s saying. Of course, the reader does not. If the writer feels that such information must be conveyed, better techniques can be used without making the character sound stilted. The information can be brought up through reactions by the receiver of the message. This is a subtle approach that makes the information flow along with natural speech. For example, Alexa might react:

     “Vinnie, I knew long even before we were dating that many women find you attractive and that you can get a little careless sometimes. The fact that you promised to change, and you are showing me that you can be a good provider renewed my hopes that you have indeed changed. Right now, all I want to know is if you are innocent, and how can I tell if you’re telling the truth?”

Alexa’s response is immediate and goes straight to the concern that she is not aware of--Vinnie being accused of sexual harassment. The past is mentioned but is brief, transient information that only supports the important event of the present. In the real world, the immediate conversation rarely lingers on too much recollection and so should that of your fictional characters. You are free to reference the past, but it should not dominate immediate concerns.

Another problem with too much information in dialogue is giving technical information on how something must be done. Let’s say that a veteran pilot is teaching a novice. The veteran explains how all those controls in the cockpit work using aeronautical jargon. Boring. One of the effective ways to bring this to the page is to give a combination of sensory description and dialogue of how the novice struggles with the controls as his mentor instructs him what to do.