This is how I discovered the term "marshmallow dialogue" over at Writers Digest, and it is the most perfect summary I've seen in a long time for an issue entirely too many of us struggle with.
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Puffy, Soft, and Sweet
Dialogue is one of the most important parts of your story, but despite its importance it is also a very easy aspect of a narrative to get wrong. Because while good dialogue can immediately draw a reader into the story, bad dialogue can leave them feeling glutted, confused, and less-than-entertained.
So how does one recognize marshmallow dialogue? Well, some of the signs are:
- Puffy: Marshmallow dialogue tends to take up a lot of room on the page, despite not saying much. It's mostly made up of hot air that just eats word count.
- Sweet: While not all dialogue has to be combative, there should be a back-and-forth when people are talking and sharing information. Generally speaking if characters are in agreement, and they aren't discussing anything of substance, it's probably a marshmallow.
- Samey: Imagine you've just eaten an entire bag of marshmallows. Now, did any one of them taste different than any of the others? Probably not... but that's a problem if each one of those marshmallows was supposed to be their own character with their own, distinct voice. If you can't tell who's talking by word choice, inflection, etc., then you might be crossing over into marshmallow territory.
As an example of what I mean, consider the dialogue in the above short story. While each speaker has their own, distinct voice when it comes to sound, there's also word choice, brevity, and no one is speaking just to fill the air. Every exchange between the characters shows us something about them, and either tells us something about their situation, or about their relationship to each other.
The thing to remember here is that there is no universal definition of good dialogue. However, we do know the traits of a marshmallow, so the key is to make sure that your story doesn't start looking too soft and sucrose in between the quotation marks.
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Excellent idea about Marshmallow text. I know I have been guilty of writing it. I listened to your example, but it didn't include a lot of dialogue, was that the point?
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