Dialogue scenes where characters speak without any physical action, setting, or sensory grounding - just voices in a void.
Talking heads is what happens when a dialogue scene becomes nothing but alternating lines of speech with no physical action, body language, environmental detail, or sensory texture. The characters stop existing as bodies in a space and become disembodied voices bouncing words back and forth. Readers lose track of who's speaking, where they are, and what anything looks or feels like.
Dialogue is one of the most powerful tools in fiction, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Real conversations happen while people fidget, cook dinner, avoid eye contact, or stare out windows. When you strip all of that away, you lose half the storytelling. The physical layer of a conversation often communicates more than the words do.
Hemingway's dialogue-heavy story avoids talking-heads syndrome precisely because the few physical details he includes - the curtain of beads, the drinks, the hills - carry enormous weight and ground every line.
Rooney writes long stretches of dialogue but consistently weaves in body language, environmental awareness, and internal reaction, keeping characters embodied even in their most verbal scenes.
The fix for talking heads isn't fancier dialogue tags ("he exclaimed," "she retorted"). It's action beats and sensory detail. Let the character crush a napkin or look away instead.
Take a dialogue scene from your work in progress that runs longer than half a page. Highlight every line that isn't dialogue - action, description, internal thought, sensory detail. If you've got more than six consecutive lines of pure dialogue, insert a grounding beat. Add one physical action that reveals something about a character's emotional state, one environmental detail the character notices mid-conversation, and one sensory element. Read it aloud and notice how the scene gains dimension.