Daily Inspiration Quote by Jerry B. Jenkins

Jenkins is smuggling a whole aesthetic into a casual craft note: dialogue isn’t primarily about realism, it’s about propulsion. “Keeps things moving” frames conversation as narrative engine, not ornamental texture. The implied enemy is the kind of talk that sounds “natural” but reads like dead air on the page - greetings, throat-clearing, the polite circling we do in real life to avoid saying what we mean. Fiction has no obligation to honor that social choreography.

“Cut to the chase” is a deliberately workmanlike phrase, the kind of newsroom/TV idiom that treats story as a sequence of beats you can trim, tighten, and deliver on schedule. That matters coming from Jenkins, a prolific, commercially successful novelist: this is craft advice with an industrial sensibility. The subtext is that readers are impatient, and they’re right to be. Every line of dialogue should either reveal a pressure point (desire, fear, leverage) or shift the situation. If it doesn’t, it’s not “authentic,” it’s waste.

There’s also an unspoken ethical claim about clarity. Cutting to the chase isn’t just speed; it’s respect for the reader’s attention and for the story’s stakes. It nudges writers toward conflict and intention: characters who want something badly enough to speak plainly or, better, to speak strategically. The irony is that the fastest dialogue often isn’t blunt at all; it’s compressed. You cut the small talk so the subtext can get loud.