A couple of chapters ago my heroine was leaping out of cupboards and karate chopping the baddies. Now that she's holed up with my hero, and trying to decipher clues found in old letters, she seems to have lost her body entirely. They both have. And the scenery has faded to white. I have nothing but talking heads.
I've read elsewhere that I should avoid continuous action because after a while readers get tired but this "dial down the action" portion is nothing more than dialogue.
Advice please?
You can get away with a pretty big percentage of the scene being dialog as long as they're talking about something interesting rather than covertly dumping a bunch of backstory or something on the reader.
But if your manuscript page (a chunk of about 250 words) is 100% dialog you're probably going a bit far. Try to bring that down to about 75% or so.
You have lots of choices about how to spice it up in just a few lines.
Add a line of description about the environment. (a chill seeped into the room as the sun vanished on the horizon)
Add a bit of description about the activity. (The letter was hand-written in a nearly illegible scrawl.)
Some commentary on the narrator's state. (Mary's worked a kink from her neck, stiff from hunching over examining documents for so long.)
Throw in a stock habit. (Bob checked his watch for the 30th time.)
Have the narrator comment internally on the conversation. (Bob seemed agitated. Was he telling everything he knew about these documents?)
Have the narrator think about how this conversation changes her understanding of past events. (So if Anne mailed this package on December 5, then she clearly did not die in a hiking accident on December 3.) Sometimes it's as simple as having a character think a piece of dialog rather than say it.
Mix it up, and choose elements that build suspence (given your genre) where you can.
