Dialogue is Immediate

"The twentieth-century reader, influenced by a century of film and a half century of television, is used to seeing what's happening in front of his eyes, not hearing about events after the fact. That's why immediate scenes--onstage, visible to the eye--dominate today's fiction. Dialogue is always in immediate scene, which is on reason readers relish it." (from Sol Stein's STEIN ON WRITING)