Ask a Published Author: "How do I balance dialogue, action and description?"

James R. Strickland has been telling stories since before he could read. After making his career in high tech, he took part in National Novel Writing Month, and in 2004, wrote the first draft of Looking Glass, which was published in 2007. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

Help! My characters do nothing but talk! What’s your advice on scene balancing (dialogue, action, description…)? — bravenewlady

The underlying questions here are what you want the scene to do, and how you want it to effect the plot and the pacing.

Some scenes are almost all talk, and if they’re done right, they can be the most dramatic. Characters can and should do interesting things, but the reasons they do them, along with a ton of characterization, are usually exposed in dialogue.

If the dialogue seems too heavy or the plot seems to die in conversation, that’s a great indication that the conversation has wandered and needs clipping back. Raymond Chandler once said, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." Dialogue interrupted with sudden violence or action is a plot accelerator I use frequently, and it makes subsequent conversations tense because the reader wonders if it’ll happen again.

Dialogue does impact pacing.  Typically the more dialogue-heavy scenes are going to be closer to the beginning, as once the action starts, dialogue tends to suffer.

As for description, this is how you, the author, control pacing, tone and feel, because it determines how the reader sees your world. When you’re setting the stage at the beginning of your novel, you can afford to have your sentences read slower and be more broadly descriptive. As the plot accelerates, your description can get tighter and tighter, or they can loosen again if you want to slow down and add complications, and so on.

There are no boxes to check, only whether the scene works in and of itself, and does what it needs to do at this point in the story.

Next week’s head counselor will be Susan Dennard, whose book,  A Darkness Strange and Lovely, hits shelves today! It’s the second in a trilogy blending historical fiction, horror, romance, and mystery .

Ask her your questions here!