Description, Dialogue, Narrative
Finding a Balance as You Write Your Story
An easy way to determine if your novel or short story is balanced between dialogue, description and narrative, plus some tips on corrections if you need them.
Have you ever read a story where the descriptions seem to go on forever? Where people talk too much without anything happening? Or the opposite, where everything happens too fast?
A good story needs a balance between the three storytelling techniques of description, dialogue and narrative. To see how your story, stacks up, try this:
- Highlight all dialogue through several chapters (or entire short story) in one color.
- Highlight all action and other narrative in another color.
- Highlight all description in a third color.
- If you use internal dialogue frequently, highlight it in a fourth color.
What do you see? Does one color dominate? Do you have long stretches of a single color? Are your colors scattered throughout, sharing paragraphs and even sentences?
Do you have huge, unbroken chunks of description?
There is a reason so many people find 19th century novels hard to read - the characters and plot may be great, but the descriptions get downright tedious. Remember that a century ago, people needed everything described because no one had seen pictures of tropical islands, let alone traveled there. In our global, multi-media world, a few well-chosen words will bring Hawaii to life for your readers.
Do you have long sections of narrative?
Fast-paced adventure novels rely on a lot of action, but sometimes you need to let your reader take a breath. Slow it down a little (in appropriate places) by interspersing dialogue and description with your narrative.
On the other hand, if your long narrative is filled with unimportant actions, be ruthless and cut! In most cases, your reader doesn’t care about all the steps to get ready for work in the morning, or all the errands to run on the way home. If it doesn’t help the story, all it’s doing is slowing it down.
Do you have pages of chatty dialogue?
Good dialogue isn’t real. In a story, you need to keep your characters on task. Yes, if you create a ditzy co-worker, his or her dialogue may wander all over the place, but by wandering, it builds the character. However, if your dialogue consists of all the normal pleasantries and asides of daily conversation, be ruthless once more and cut!
Are your characters talking to themselves too much?
Those of us who write have a lot going on in our heads, so we often think our characters do, too. Your task is to decide what needs to be said through internal dialogue, and what would be better shown by action or dialogue with another person.
Ideal Balance
Now that you’ve looked closely at the techniques you’re using, realize that the ideal balance will be different for different types of stories. Literary fiction is often told with much more narration and description than dialogue. Children’s stories usually have more dialogue and narrative than description. Decide what’s best for your story, and use the analysis you’ve just done to make it better.
