I screened Clint Eastwood’s Grand Torino the other day, and though I enjoyed it, I had to cringe when I heard a certain dialogue exchange between Walt (Eastwood), a Korean War Vet, and his young Vietnamese neighbor, Thao.
Thao: “How many?”
Walt: “How many what?”
Thao: “How many men did you kill?”
This could be perfectly decent dialogue if the line preceding “how many” were in need of quantifying, as in, “I killed a lot of men in the war.” (“How many?”) But there’s no such motivator. Thus “how many” is not an honest conversational response; rather, it’s an artificial dialogue extender. It’s a device, pure and simple, and a bad one.
Imagine saying to someone, without specific prompting, “when?”
In real life, there wouldn’t be a clue to what you were talking about, and you’d look pretty silly. My wife would probably fire back, “Is this some kind of joke?”
What’s even worse is how often this lame dialogue trick is trotted out––and by professionals. Whenever I run across it, a giant banner unfurls in my mind, shouting, “PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT AUTHOR BEHIND THE CURTAIN,” because for the moment (and here’s what’s critical) the spell of the fiction is broken.
A few more slips of the the curtain like that and you’ve lost your reader.
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BTW, the Clint Eastwood’s character’s neighbors are not Vietnamese; they are the Hmong people.