What comes first, dialogue or narrative?

Neither comes first.

Plot first, always, for me.

Well. You need to master both to write a good book.

I suppose it depends on the story, how it's told, and what kind of writer you are. Except for "which is more important" (all of them are important!), there really is no right answer to your question.

For me, writing only dialogue first and filling in the blanks later would be pretty terrible. That wouldn't work for me, because the majority of my stories are told through the narrative. Not to mention, I can never leave blank spots in my writing to "fill in later."

But if you're writing a very dialogue-heavy story where most of it is told through dialogue, and you're not the kind who minds leaving sections to fill in later, then go for it. There's no reason it can't work for someone. Go ahead and try it.

Assuming you're writing a novel or a short story, the question you may want to ask yourself if dialogue is THAT primary to your story is if you're writing a screenplay, or a play instead.

Project nachonaco said:

Heheheh.

Yeah, I meant in the actual building of the novel. Dialogue and narrative.

Is it wrong to write dialogue first and then fill-in-the-blanks?

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This is what I thought you meant. While I agree there is no one right way to write, I also stand by my initial response of neither comes first. If you try to write one, then go back and fill in the other, more than likely there's going to be problems with flow. It will read as if you wrote one then went back and filled in the other later. What you're talking about is entirely different than skipping a scene that's not working to write forward.

Work on integrating them so that they flow smoothly together. One should feed the other.

Funny. My intelligence doesn't feel insulted. I'm just trying to figure out what I want for dinner: scrambled eggs or grilled cheese.

It's a good topic. If you do have a weak area -- and what writer doesn't -- how do you work on it to improve it? After all, if you're working on music or martial arts, you can isolate a problem area and just focus on that one thing for a little while before integrating it back into the overall process. How do you accomplish the same thing with writing?

On one of my recent drafts I somehow wrote 10,000 words of dialogue without any accompanying description of the speakers or their surroundings, so I have to go back one day and fix the damn thing. I don't recommend doing it this way.


It was really good dialogue, though.

I write both at the same time. Mostly, I write Fairly Decent dialogue alongside Pure Crap narrative, so they both have to be fixed in revisions anyhow.

Project nachonaco said:

Yeah, I tried that, so that's why I'm trying to get the dialogue out of the way first.

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I am curious about this. When I work on a scene, I literally see everything in it -- expressions, movements, etc. -- along with the dialogue. Part of the problem, I think, is that the narrative becomes "too much" since not half the details I'm aware of are actually important to note.

I wonder if writing dialogue first, then filling in the narrative I already know exists would help eliminate unnecessary details in the first draft. I couldn't do this for a whole novel, but it might just be my New Exercise.

I don't think I could come up with only dialogue from the start, though. I'd have to be consciously eliminating narrative along the way.