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 read the news for that.)
Dialogue versus Interiority
Robert B. Parker, who passed away over 10 years ago, is one of my favorite authors. I enjoyed his early Spenser novels the most. To be honest, I wasn’t as happy with him in the later years of his career. His novels became dialogue heavy, lacking the narrative I had so enjoyed in his earlier books. He had a lot of white space and not much interiority.
Basically, he stopped exploring the inner character’s–thoughts, emotional reactions, and feelings–about a situation. Sure I knew Spenser, Susan, and Hawk really well, but I still want to know how the story affects them.
And while dialogue can achieve wonders in a story, the reader stills needs interior anchors that flesh out the scene and the characters.
When Ace Akins was given the job of writing the Spenser books, I was leery of the end product. Then I read that Mr. Akins was a lifelong fan of the Spenser books. To my delight, his additions to the series brought the original flavor of the Spenser books back to life. His stories had a nice balance of narrative and dialogue.
I think Mr. Parker’s reliance on dialogue in his later novels made me feel cheated. He was no longer writing with all the nuances I enjoyed and expected. He had too much white space.
Which is why I think some novels make better screenplays. A screenplay is supposed to be dialogue heavy.
Huh?
Novel versus Screenplay
Think about it. A screenplay doesn’t need all the components of a novel. The curtain rises and the setting is clear to the audience. The movie is set in a diner, suburbia, or a football field.
An actor walks on stage and the audience makes immediate deductions: male or female, tall or short, blonde or brunette. The actor starts speaking and the audience thinks, oh, a Russian accent.
You get the idea. The movie setting and actors anchor the audience into the movie world within moments of the opening scene.
The writer doesn’t have this luxury. The opening paragraphs set the scene and introduce the characters. The reader “sees” the story via the writer who uses many elements to bring the story alive for the reader. Dialogue should only be one of the paths a writer follows to bring the story alive.
Back to the question at hand:
How to tell if your story has too much dialogue.
One very visual way to determine if your story has too much dialogue: highlight the dialogue. This can be done using a highlighter pen on printed pages, or the highlight tool on computer documents.
In either method, the goal is to highlight the dialogue. This offers the writer a concrete visual of how much of the story is dialogue and how much is narrative. Large blocks of either dialogue or narrative can be rewritten to ensure there is a nice balance between narrative, dialogue, and white space.
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