by Chris McMahon
Reading a few new authors recently, I’ve realised how much of range there is in terms of dialogue. Some authors – including very successful ones – manage to get away with almost 60% dialogue in the text. Somehow I always feel that’s cheating, but then again good dialogue is difficult to write.
Other writers have scant dialogue between literally pages and pages of solid prose – and not necessarily short paragraphs either. This seems to break a ‘balance’ rule, yet often they manage to pull this off, especially if there is compelling internal dialogue (and first person PoV).
I guess it comes down to whether they are managing to sustain the narrative, and to maintain the connection with character despite the ‘vehicle’.
What intrigues me is how much this is deliberate on the part of the author. For my own part, I seem to slant toward prose rather than dialogue, but the balance turns out pretty well (at least I hope it does!). Although most certainly this just arises from the natural rhythm of the writing as it emerges – and the type of scene. Action scenes tend to have a low component of dialogue, well at least mine do. Nothing worse than a chatty evil overlord after all:)
So how about you? Do you allow the balance between dialogue and prose to emerge pretty much on its own terms, or do you carefully craft to meet an ideal?
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “Dialogue”
Dialogue is pretty much my least favourite part of writing. I know I am gettting better(slowly), but I hate having to put words into other people’s mouths
Hi, Brendan. It’s interesting what a range there is in terms of how writers approach their work. I often hear other writers say they can’t seem to shut their characters up – somehow I think that’s also a problem.
Have you tried exercises like putting you characters in a room and asking things like interview questions to get a sense for their voice?
I think dialogue is one of the things I do pretty well but I don’t give any thought to how much is in my writing. I just write.
Hi, Scott. I think you do it well. I also think you have a pretty good balance of dialogue and prose in your work – or at least the sort of balance I like:)
My first drafts are heavy on prose, sliding into “telling instead of showing” and large data dumps. My first read-throughs tend to pepper the manuscript with notes, the most common “///snt!” and occasionally “/// snt, damn it!” The hash marks are for easy searchability. Their numbers tend to grow through the first edits.
Dialogue is one way I fix the mess. My dialogue is good, once I get into an imaginary conversation or argument. I think. :: sigh :: only the marketplace knows!
HI, Pam. Sounds like you know all the elements of your work that need to come together. I seem to get all the different elements straight up, but need to finesse them over the obligatory umpteen drafts.
I also tend toward prose, although not so much. It’s interesting you can write good dialogue, but don’t tend to include that in first drafts. Maybe you could try doing more work to engage characters before the first draft? Perhaps they would get their ‘voice’ from the outset?
Oh, I get quite a bit of dialogue in the first draft. I often open with dialogue. It just keeps sliding into prose and world building.
I think I do well with dialog. I probably don’t do much of anything to distinguish between characters, but I hope that everyone is still talking like a real person would talk, even if they all pretty much talk the same. Meanwhile it’s something to work on.
I’ve recently stumbled over a category romance writer that I simply can not read. Part of it is that she’s “telling” constantly. The rhythm of the prose is dialog-statement/emotional-explanation, dialog-statement/emotional-explanation. I might be able to tolerate that except that the dialog is horrible. It reads like “as you know, Bob” even when Bob wouldn’t know. No one speaks unless it is to convey information.
On the good side, the author is clearly not withholding any information from the reader. On the not so good side, none of the characters withhold any information from each other and seem never to delude themselves.
Characters should delude themselves.
Hey, Synova. I agree completely. One of the fun things bout writing is to create each character in their own world, with their uniquely skewed PoV. Gemmell was great at that – he would get inside the villans heads and show how they saw themselves are perfectly reasonable in their choices – great stuff. It was always his heroes that were tortured and conflicted.
Sounds like you did a good job perservering through that book! I don’t have that sort of patience these days:)
For me the difficult bit is letting the characters have their own voices. For a while there I had to give each of my majors some kind of verbal “tic” so that they’d read different in dialog, instead of everyone from every possible background sounding the same.
Hi, Kate. That sounds like a good way to get the ball rolling. For some reason mine seem to come with their own voice, but that is probably one good thing about growing up with 10 older brothers and sisters – my mind is keyed for a large group of individuals.
A lot of my earlier stories, sold and unsold, were very dialog heavy–70-80% at a guess–and that probably contributed a good bit to the “I didn’t really get a sense of place” complaint I got from some editors. (Probably? The husband of one of those editors, in a phone conversation, flat out said that that was what she meant when she used that phrase.) My two most recent sales use a lot less dialog and a lot more scene setting, but then one of the two is to a large extent about the setting (What Orson Scott Card called a “Milieu” story) and the other revolved around a lot of solo action where there wasn’t anyone to talk to.
“Needs of the story” and all that, I guess.