5 Reasons Why As-You-Know Dialogue Doesn't Work

"As you know, my dear brother Edward Malloy," said Katterina, "in our world magic is real, and our magically gifted father, Andrew Malloy, is a skilled horse-talker. And I have inherited his skill."
"And as you know, my not-very-dear sister who is in fact only a step-sister," Edward replied, "I do not have any such magical gift, and since I am a nasty sort of man, that ticks me off."

Why doesn't that dialogue work? Well, I'm sure there are countless ways as I wrote it as an example of bad dialogue. But the chief flaw is something called 'as-you-know' dialogue.

Now, don't be mistaken. As-you-know dialogue doesn't need to have the words 'as you know' in it to be there, stinking up your Work-in-Progress. As-you-know dialogue is any dialogue in which one character tells another something they both already know. It's a device inexperienced writers sometimes use to fill in backstory and other information. But it doesn't work. Here are the reasons why.

Reason #1: As-you-know dialogue is unrealistic.
Think back to your real life. As a kid, did you ever come down and say to your mom, "Greetings, my 34-year-old German-American mother, married to my 33-year-old store manager father of Scottish extraction?" No. That would have been silly. Your mom already knew all that stuff--- heck, she's probably the one who told you. And in real life, we don't waste our breaths filling one another in on this stuff that we both know. Readers are very well aware of this, and are jolted out of the story by this misuse of dialogue.

Reason #2: As-you-know dialogue may be giving too much information.
Neophyte writers often feel that the reader needs tons of information about the backstory--- the history of the characters--- dumped in their laps as soon as possible. But the reader actually needs a lot less than you would think to understand the story. Giving information a small bit at a time rewards your reader for continuing to read. It's better than tossing it all out at once in the form of clumsy dialogue.

Reason #3: As-you-know dialogue hurts character development.
Your readers get to know your characters through two things: what they do and what they say. When you use dialogue clumsily for an info dump, you are saying that the characters involved are the type of people who chatter uselessly about things they both know. Is that really the direction you want to take your characters in? It's particularly fatal when you want to portray a character as the strong, silent type.

Reason #4: As-you-know dialogue is uninteresting. 
Normal dialogue is exciting to the reader because the characters are reacting to one another. In the sample dialogue above, if Katterina had been talking to a stranger, newly come across the barrier between her world and ours, the revelation about magic being real in the world would have been a surprise. We would have been curious to see the character's reaction to the surprise. But with two characters reciting things they both know, the only reaction they have to the information is ho-hum. Which leads the reader to regard this dialogue as the boring part, to be skipped over--- thus missing all that information you thought he needed to have.

Reason #5: Agents, editors and book reviewers react badly to as-you-know dialogue.
As-you-know dialogue is widely known as the mark of the beginning writer. When your book is being evaluated by the people that count, they will hit your patch of as-you-know dialogue and put your book down, rejected. They will write you off as a not-yet-ready-for-publication beginner.

Have you been using as-you-know dialogue? Check by asking yourself, at each patch of dialogue, why these characters are talking to one another--- what is their motivation to exchange words? Are they trading information, or expressing feelings? If the only reason you can find is because you, the writer, want to dump some information into the story, rewrite that passage. Dialogue is not the right way to do it.

Exercise: Find a book you like which has a lot of backstory and background that has to be given to the reader. Read through, notebook in hand, and write down the page numbers where bits of this information are given, and note down how they are given. This will make you more aware of how experienced writers give information to readers--- or withhold it.


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