When a Novel Becomes a Screenplay
How do you tell if your story has too much dialogue? This question was posed to me by an attendee at one of my Zoom writing presentations. It’s a good question and like a good question it nagged me far longer than the answer I gave that day. Finding the right balance between narrative and dialogue is a challenge. Too much dialogue and you’re writing a screenplay. Too much narrative and sleep overpowers the reader. Balancing dialogue with narrative reminds me of advice a commercial printer gave me: white space is good in a newsletter. (I’ve written a lot of newsletters in my day.) He said pages need to be a balancing act between text, images, and white space to keep the reader engaged. Although I don’t use images in my fiction, I found this concept–balancing dialogue and narrative–works for stories, too. Caveat: I read and write for entertainment so my opinion is shaded toward commercial (read for pleasure) fiction more than literary (usually designed to make the reader sad. I...