HENRY: The day those stout hearts band together is the day that pigs get wings.

ELEANOR: There’ll be pork in the treetops come the morning. Don’t you see: you’ve given them common cause: new sons. You leave the country and you’ve lost it.

The Lion in Winter, for which Katherine Hepburn won the 1968 Academy Award for best actress, served up intensely dramatic performances from both Hepburn and Peter O’Toole despite the fact that, during the entire show, absolutely nothing happened. The characters were cooped up in Chinon castle for Christmas Court. No one died, nothing was destroyed, nothing was created, and no one was even injured. Somehow, screenwriter James Goldman crafted a hugely successful dramatic work from a puff of pure intrigue. How could such an artificial literary construct sustain itself without some form of external action?

As I see it, Goldman, recognized the dramatic potential inherent in adversarial dialogue. Often, literary works focus on the opportunity to deliver characters’ internal musings as a mechanism for keeping the reader apprised of needs, wants, and future intentions, and books are a medium uniquely suited to that approach. Once the reader and character bond, those internal descriptions can highlight the character’s priorities and generate empathy instrumental for holding the reader’s interest. Such internal dialogue is therefore a versatile tool in an author’s literary arsenal. However, it can suffer from the same limitations as other info-dump approaches – since internal dialogue is not inherently dramatic, the scene’s drama depends instead on external action.

Adversarial dialogue provides an additional tool for providing dramatic tension on those occasions when external conflicts wouldn’t advance the plot. It also provides ample opportunities to layer in subtlety. As readers, when we’re given a character’s internal thoughts, unless the narrator is unreliable, we tend to accept those musings as fact. Real life, however, tends to be more nuanced – people often significantly oversimplify their perspectives in ways that best suit their needs and biases and cast them in the most sympathetic light. Adversarial dialogue can therefore be a fantastic way to highlight a situation’s complexities in ways that would be difficult using internal dialogue alone. The aspects of a situation that a character denies (even subconsciously) can be every bit as defining as those accepted – and adversarial dialogue is a great way to draw those out.

Our culture has long appreciated the advantages of an adversarial approach for arriving at truth – indeed, that principle undergirds our entire justice system. The O.J. Simpson case exemplifies the adversarial process’s dramatic potential. That case – in essence an argument between the prosecution and a famous sports personality to convince an impartial observer to accept their version of the facts – riveted the entire country for months.

In the context of a novel, adversarial dialog can be used to wring drama out of almost any situation that has consequences based on a character’s decision, whether it is multiple characters arguing to convince an impartial observer or simply two characters arguing to determine a joint course of action. In both the O.J. case and the Lion in Winter excerpt above, the drama arises from the reader’s appreciation of the decision’s consequences – the tighter the connection between reader and character and the more severe the consequences, the greater the dramatic potential.

Of course, works that rely significantly on the use of adversarial dialogue also require more engagement from the reader. As with the O.J. case, readers will have to consider the evidence presented by various sides and use their judgment to determine whose worldview is more accurate. As a result, they will be less able to rely on spoon-fed incontrovertible truth delivered through internal dialogue. Such works tend not to be easy beach reads, and they won’t appeal to everyone. But if you crave complex nuanced situations and increased depth of character, you might find works that make ample use of adversarial dialogue, such as the Heiromancer Trilogy, worth the extra effort.