Much early fiction has relatively little dialogue (although perhaps the epistolary novel could well be thought of as dialogue -- just a very long one). Some modern fiction, though is driven by dialogue, and in a few cases -- Stephen King's Dolores Claiborne comes to mind -- there are novels which are entirely crafted from dialogue alone.
What advice can one give about dialogue, though? Plenty, as it turns out: some advise attending plays and reading their scripts, to see how a story can be advanced by dialogue alone (though of course it's the actors' job to make whatever lines they're given sound spontaneous and natural). Some advise reading novels by writers known for their skill at dialogue -- Jeffrey Eugenides, Elmore Leonard, Sinclair Lewis, and Jean Rhys are often mentioned -- but imitation only goes so far. The best suggestion I know was one I was given many years ago: go to a place where people talk -- a diner, a coffee shop, a waiting room at a bus or train station -- and sit there for a few hours. Bring a pad of paper (or a smartphone), but conceal it as much as possible -- then write down as accurately as you can every snippet of conversation you hear. When you get home, format it as dialogue, and read it aloud to yourself, fine-tuning it while the memory is still fresh.
You'll be surprised, I think, how that experiment will show you that much of actual human conversation is composed of fragments, half-completed utterances, mumbles and repetitions. Fictional dialogue doesn't always allow speech be quite as chaotic as speech actually is -- but listening to it repeatedly, one can hear an underlying rhythm that's invaluable when writing dialogue of your own.
For this exercise, you have two options: 1) Try the experiment above, and write up the results as formatted dialogue; or 2) Take a section of your current writing project, consisting of a paragraph (at least) or two (at most) of direct narration, and replace the narration completely with dialogue, but conveying the same information. If you choose the second option, submit both the original narrative passage and your dialogue version. As before, e-mail your pieces to me, attaching them as Word documents, or if you prefer sharing them as Google docs.
