Dialogue won't save your boring content

Today's email opens with a bloody awesome message I received from one of my subscribers:

Hey Cass, I wanted to tell you that you send some of the best emails a person can read. And I'm enjoying them.

You wanna know why?

Because you use one form of storytelling nobody seems to use – one I’ve been preaching about.

Dialogue (and you do it so well).

What can I say? I'm just that good, baby 💁‍♀️

But also, I did actually say thank you lol. And I mentioned that I secretly want to be a sci-fi/fantasy novelist when I grow up, sooo gotta practice dialogue somewhere, right?

He replied that he was writing an article on the importance of dialogue in storytelling.

"I would appreciate your thoughts and feedback on it," he added.

Now, I used to give copywriting feedback to anyone and everyone who asked me for it... to the point I had to blanket-rule start saying no.

But in this case, I found the subject matter pretty interesting. So I offered to give him feedback in exchange for letting me critique his argument in this email.

Because while I DO agree with the general premise: that business storytelling—especially on LinkedIn—has become contrived and stale...

I don't think adding dialogue is gonna make a difference. 🤷‍♀️

For context, his argument is that storytelling on professional platforms has reached peak saturation.

Essentially, everyone's stupid posts from their LiVeD eXpEriEnCe have become so predictable that nobody gives a shit anymore.

He goes on to say that incorporating real dialogue is the most effective way to break this predictability and "inject energy" into writing.

He argues dialogue can:

1. Break the template structure, so the story doesn't feel like a conveyor belt of key points.
2. "Hide" the CTA by keeping the reader focused on the natural flow of conversation.
3. Act as social proof, transforming a generic case study into what feels like an eyewitness account.

"Okay Cass, so what exactly DON'T you agree with?"

It's not so much that I don't agree dialogue can DO all those things.

It's just that if everyone rushed to add dialogue to their LinkedIn posts, emails or whatever else, it'd get bloody boring, predictable and stale just as quickly as the other tropes have done.

Dialogue is fun. I use it a lot. But it's not what makes my emails work. It's just the "visible" part that's easy to point to.

What actually makes my emails—and ANY good writing—work is:

...

...

🥁

wait for it...

...

...

PACING.

And, as funny as it was to add those line breaks into this email—it is NOT a good example of pacing lol.

Good pacing is controlling what the reader knows, when they know it, and how long they have to sit with it before the next thing happens or the next nugget of information is revealed.

Dialogue can definitely help with this.

It can delay a reveal.

It can show friction.

It can make a moment feel immediate.

It can let the reader discover something instead of being told it.

...But dialogue can also make a story WORSE.

Because if it doesn't increase tension, reveal character, sharpen the stakes, shift the reader's understanding of what's happening... or at the very least, ENTERTAIN, then it's just as bad as the idiots on LinkedIn who think the pinnacle of storytelling is:

Once upon a time, I was working 20 hours a day, and I wasn't making any money. But then one day, I just decided to start making money. Now I work 20 minutes a day and make all of the money.

Also, for the record... sometimes dialogue is boring and convoluted.

Seriously, there are plenty of emails I've written where I ended up scrapping the dialogue because it just didn't WORK, and everything that HAS made it into an email has been edited for clarity.

Because the job of good dialogue isn't just to reproduce what was said. It's to support pacing.

Sometimes that means taking a ten-second moment and slowing it right down because THAT's where the tension is.

Sometimes it means skipping ahead three hours because nothing interesting happened and nobody gives a shit.

Sometimes you do this with dialogue, and sometimes you just cut the dialogue and skip to explaining what the fuck happened.

Don't understand what I mean? Boy, have I got homework for you.

Go pick up any of your favourite books. Or if you're lame and don't read fiction, watch a movie or TV show.

You know how one minute something is happening, and then all of a sudden it's cut to a new scene? And sometimes there's missing context, and you're like "OoOh, what's gonna happen??"

Yeah, it's called PACING.

So my homework for you is to go and make a note of some of the key scene changes in your favourite piece of media. What information do you have before the change? How long does it take for the missing context to be revealed?

As a general rule, the higher the stakes, the longer it takes to get to the reveal... which is why in business storytelling we tend to get to the point way quicker than in, say, a sci-fi/fantasy novel lol.

Regardless, the exercise will help you understand how critical pacing is in any writing—dialogue or no.

Cheers,
Cass