learner writer + overuse of dialogue

I found I wrote a lot of dialogue at first because that part of the story is in one's head already existing in verbal descriptors. I had to work at learning how to describe the settings and other elements of the story because those were in my head as images.

My first drafts are like 80% dialogue and I have to go back and fill in. I hear the whole thing in my head and yes, even run through it talking to myself like a crazy person. I don't tend to delete a lot of the dialogue. I just add reactions, emotional queues and setting to the talking heads.

There are so many touchy-feely details to the craft of writing... One thing that I have found wonderful is asking my husband to read my writing out loud to me. If something is clunky, boring, overdone or whatever, it seems to stand out so much more clearly when I hear it rather than read it.

Just to throw this out there, Hemingway's short story "The Killers" seems to be like 75% dialogue.

Harlequin said:

I've had a slew of betas, one editor, crit partners... I'm learning as I go, I guess.

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Have people carped about the amount of dialogue? How do you​ feel about it when you read your own stuff?

Harlequin said:

I do wonder if I rely on dialogue too much due to inexperience rather than because of style choice.

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Surely what matters is not the amount of dialogue, but what the dialogue is doing. How much of it carries story weight and how much of it is fluff that could be cut? Are you using dialogue to avoid writing action? Is it repetitive? How many conversations drag on longer than they need to? Or conversely, how many could use more depth?

Those might be the questions you'll want to consider.

The coffee maker hissed and gurgled as it dispensed its life saving fluid. Rat listened the machine as he sat at the edge of the mattress and stared up at his only window. The view wasn’t much, the backyard was covered with cement so nothing grew out there; all he saw was a bit of wooden fence and the bleached blue sky of early morning. After a moment of mentally dulled reflection, he heaved himself off the mattress and got dressed.

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is bleached blue a color that needs hyphenation?

indianroads said:

is bleached blue a color that needs hyphenation?

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I would hyphenate it. But what does this have to do with whether or not the OP has too much dialogue? Did you accidentally post in the wrong thread?

You mentioned especially for your genre, what is it?

Also, am I correct in thinking genres like YA and comedy would be the ones with the most dialogue?

The amount of dialogue is ultimately a stylistic choice. Some authors write a lot of description and all that. Others are more minimalist in description, relying on dialogue to tell the story. There's no set amount of dialogue you must have.

BethS said:

I would hyphenate it. But what does this have to do with whether or not the OP has too much dialogue? Did you accidentally post in the wrong thread?

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Yikes, yeah posted in the wrong thread... dang it. Sorry about that.

Harlequin said:

Got measuring tapes? How long is that piece of string, then?

Concerned I use too much dialogue, especially for my genre. Yes, I know if the shoe fits it can be worn (although surely the moral of that allegory is that the shoe never fits, unless you're Cinderella, and I'm not...) but I do wonder if I rely on dialogue too much due to inexperience rather than because of style choice.

Thoughts?

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I think you do not trust your talent as much as you should.

One of my running jokes with my alpha-reader is "As usual I put two characters in a room and they started talking about things."

My educational training for writing was screenplays. Dialog rules there. Moving to novels I find dialog is still the strongest element I write, but I've learned to write narrative and internalization as well. But, there are still points where the scene is focused on what characters are saying. Not a bad thing if that's what a particular story calls for.

Things to watch for: Characters recapping in conversation a scene we just witnessed, As You Know Bob conversations, characters discussing something that has no conflict/subtext. (Subtext for a scene can always be reduced to "yes" and "no". If it's not there, the subtext is flawed.)

But some characters talk more than others. Some situations require brainstorming rather than immediate action. Trust your gut. If you don't like what you feel, do something different. (Even if you don't keep the something different you can make a decision about what works better.)

Aggy B. said:

.... Things to watch for: Characters recapping in conversation a scene we just witnessed, As You Know Bob conversations, characters discussing something that has no conflict/subtext. (Subtext for a scene can always be reduced to "yes" and "no". If it's not there, the subtext is flawed.) ...

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I've been deleting redundant dialogue like crazy and I can't believe how much I'm finding. I hate it when I read the same thing in other people's books, and now I see how easy that is to do.

The advice I've heard leans toward showing (via dialogue and scenes) rather than telling (description, summary). Action and character interaction is more interesting to readers.

That said, how you write a scene depends on the POV of your character. He might be waiting to meet someone and going over what he wants to accomplish in the meeting. Also, how much is your MC stuck in his own head? Does he think before reacting? Is there some unspoken context to the scene?

MaeZe said:

I found I wrote a lot of dialogue at first because that part of the story is in one's head already existing in verbal descriptors. I had to work at learning how to describe the settings and other elements of the story because those were in my head as images.

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I had the same problem, plus not realising that other people wouldn't get the same images in their head automatically from reading the dialogue (I started creative writing as a hobby when I was 12 so there were a lot of things I didn't realise).

Back to the OP: what you need to avoid is the whole "talking heads" thing, i.e. the impression that disembodied characters (or disembodied heads or voices) are speaking in a blank room. You need enough other info for the conversations to be real.

You also need to avoid the temptation to write everything that characters say. That's another thing I used to do. I'd see entire conversations playing in my head between my characters as they interacted with each other and thought I was supposed to write the entire conversation down, small talk and random stuff and everything. (This goes hand in hand with way too much stage direction.) These days I realise that you only need to include the important bits, and some conversations are better rendered as indirect speech. For example:

I walked into the office and Tracey was standing by the tea machine.
"Alright Tracey? How's it going?"
"Not too bad... I'm a bit behind my target though."
"Yeah and me. Hope I'll catch up this afternoon."
"Did you hear, Jackie's leaving. She got a job at Tesco's. Payroll department."
"Oh my God! I can't believe that! She was so into this job!"
"Yeah I know!"
"Anyway, gotta dash, my break's over in one minute"
"Okay, see you around!"

Can all be replaced by: I bumped into Tracey by the tea machine and she told me Jackie was leaving. New job in Tesco's payroll department, apparently. Jackie! I can't believe it. I thought she loved this job.

i.e. focusing on what's important rather than feeling the need to relay every single thing that the characters are saying as the story plays out in your head.

The above is not an exhaustive list of potential pitfalls, but overall I'd say if you're getting feedback from others that there's too much dialogue (or if you feel that way when you're reading and editing your work), then it's likely that you have a lot of dialogue isn't doing anything useful, rather than it being about the actual amount of dialogue. (Or there's nothing wrong at all but you've been told some arbitary percentage that may be irrelevant to the type of story you're writing.)

As long as the all the dialogue is doing something useful (moving the plot forward, worldbuilding, character development etc) and there's enough non-dialogue there for all of what's going on to be clear, then there isn't really such a thing as too much dialogue. Some types of story will naturally have a lot more dialogue than others, i.e. stories where the action will take place through people speaking (courtroom dramas spring to mind).

I noticed I tend to write more dialogue when starting out (I write out of order), then I have to go back and fill in with the other stuff to flesh things out (exposition, action, reaction, what they're thinking -- can't think of the word right now -- description, etc.) I think the reason for this is because in real life interactions with other people are mostly dialogue. But we have to go deeper into the characters' minds in order that readers can connect with the story more, to feel it more. So we have to expand on the dialogue.

I like dialogue-heavy stories. But only if the dialogue's interesting (like conflict's involved). If a story goes a long time without dialogue, I tend to get bored and start skimming until the next section of dialogue.

Like some others have said, it is partly stylistic and different readers have different preferences.

I think as long as you give enough details to ground readers (something I have to keep in mind) and enough character emotions (something else I've been working on), and you make sure your dialogue moves the story and is full of conflict or characterization or something interesting, you should be good.

CJ

What Lakey just said. It's also possible that your work feels or reads like dialogue is overused because there isn't enough balance of it with narrative. Long stretches of largely uninterrupted dialogue can get tedious, even if the dialogue is on point and relevant to story. Post a characteristic example in SYW, long enough to give a feel for the style.

caw