Dialogue-heavy novels

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unthoughtknown

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I have noticed that I really enjoy writing dialogue.

Can anyone please give some examples of dialogue-heavy novels that have done quite well? (I suppose I could just google that. Still interested to hear examples from AW'ers here.)

Very curious.

Many thanks.
 
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dondomat

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Creating the vibe of epic space opera through dialogues and off-stage action: Foundation--Asimov

Creating the vibe of spy thriller through dialogues and off-stage action: John le Carre

Creating the vibe of horror thriller through dialogues and off-stage action: Peter Straub

Any real literature, for example Kingsley Amis, Scott Fitzgerald

Also authors from the Evil Empire side: Stanislaw Lem, Victor Pelevin, the Strugatsky brothers
 
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Samsonet

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Parnell Hall's Puzzle Lady series has a lot of dialogue. It's really witty, too, even if the author could use a few more dialogue tags. Seriously, when you've got two or three pages of unbroken dialogue, you've gotta give the reader a clue as to who's speaking when or they'll get lost.
 

eyeblink

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I have noticed that I really enjoy writing dialogue.

Can anyone please give some examples of dialogue-heavy novels that have done quite well? (I suppose I could just google that. Still interested to hear examples from AW'ers here.)

Very curious.

Many thanks.

Anything by Roddy Doyle, especially his first two novels The Commitments and The Snapper. His non-dialogue writing became rather less minimal after that.

Alan Garner's Red Shift is mostly dialogue with narrative pared down to the point of being very elliptical, which makes it a challenging book but certainly a rewarding one.
 

neandermagnon

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My writing used to be very dialogue heavy, mostly because I tend to write character driven novels, but I've since realised that they were dialogue heavy because I wasn't writing enough of the other stuff - character actions (including feelings/facial expressions), description and setting. There's a danger of dialogue becoming "talking heads" i.e. just conversation without enough context, giving the impression of disembodied voices talking in a vacuum. I still write character driven novels that are full of dialogue, but there's enough other stuff in there too. (And beware of going to the opposite extreme, which is adding in unnecessary actions, description etc that just weighs it all down... it's about getting the balance right - the story has to keep moving at an appropriate pace, but you need enough setting, context and non-dialogue actions for it to feel real).

If you're sure that's not what's going on, then there's nothing wrong with a novel being dialogue heavy. Famous examples have already been named. Character driven novels with lots of verbal interaction between characters sound good to me.
 
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flapperphilosopher

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A lot of Hemingway's stuff is pretty dialogue heavy, especially The Sun Also Rises and many of his short stories (though he also wrote novels and short stories with very little dialogue).

The other month I read a novel that was all dialogue--not even tags. I love dialogue but was dubious. I felt it worked, though, without feeling like just a script. That was Your Fathers, Where are they? And the Prophets, do they Live Forever? by Dave Eggers.
 

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I haven't sat down and looked at the ratios in any of the books I've read (is there an app for that), but it seems like most modern novels have a goodly amount of dialog, often more than 50% of the total writing. Someone on another writing site was ranting about this the other day--says that modern novels are turning into screen plays. His opinions about it aside, it appears that dialog as a means of moving story forward is popular.

This doesn't mean that there shouldn't be associated descriptions, reflection, actions and so on as well, or that every scene in a novel should be structured around dialog. It's about what you need to tell your story or move a given scene forward.

Of course, whether a dialog heavy approach works for a given scene or novel? That's something for your readers to weigh in on.

Many people are tossing out classics that are dialog heavy, so this person who claims it's a newfangled thing might well be wrong, and in fact, it's more of an old-fashioned approach. I'm curious, is it something that's actually become less common in recent years (since none of the examples people posted are current titles), and is it more common or less common in genre fiction? How about with YA versus adult fiction?

I assume when one is writing today, one is shooting for a different style than the classics, but genre and target audience may be important too.
 
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Osulagh

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The Count of Monte Cristo by Alex Dumas reworked my thoughts on dialogue-heavy novels.
 

Roxxsmom

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Out of curiosity, what counts as dialog heavy in terms of percentage, and how does one calculate this? A round number that people often toss out for a "typical" novel is around 50% dialog and 50% narrative/action, but has anyone actually tested this?
 

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Just about anything written by Elmore Leonard has a very lot of dialogue, but I don't know if his works are "dialogue heavy."

What does "dialogue heavy" even mean?
 

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Define "dialogue heavy". It all depends on the story you're telling. Some stories, told in a certain style, need a lot more dialogue than others.
 

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Just about anything written by Elmore Leonard has a very lot of dialogue, but I don't know if his works are "dialogue heavy."

What does "dialogue heavy" even mean?

Asking the same question, and no one is answering it...

Also, how does one calculate the percentage of dialog in a novel? The only method that's halfway easy I've come up with is randomly selecting a number of pages from a work (say 10) and counting the lines that contain dialog and the lines that don't on each of those pages, then coming up with a percentage based on that. Still a lot of work, and prone to sampling error. Are there any programs or apps that can do this for manuscripts or for e-books?
 

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I think it's important to remember that in any novel with a great deal of dialogue that it not take place in what I call the white bubble. You can weave details into your story as the dialogue occurs so that it feels grounded in a world that actually does or could exist. Otherwise, you are writing a script.
 

EMaree

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Do dialect novels count as dialogue-heavy? Personally, I would say they're the highest tier of dialogue-heaviness, where the whole book is written as a casual dialogue.

Some dialect novel examples for ye, OP: A Clockwork Orange, Blood Red Road, The Knife of Never Letting Go, Trainspotting.
 

kkbe

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I don't know if there's a way to quantify a 'dialogue heavy' novel, but it's easy to discern which novels have a ton of dialogue and which ones don't. Question is--however a novel is written--does it work?

Deft writers make it work. When dialogue gets in the way of the story, I think it's either too much, or it isn't being written right.

The key is economy, saying what you need to say clearly and concisely. No padding, no fluff. So even if your novel is dialogue heavy, every word your characters speak is pulling its weight, and not getting in the way of the story you're trying to tell.
 
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Australian River

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When I am interested in a book I scroll/flip through the first 3 chapters. If almost every new paragraph starts with quotation marks (something which is easy to spot), I usually know it's not the kind of book for me (all personal taste of course).
 

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To me, a dialogue heavy novel is one in which two or more characters sit unmoving for long stretches with no movement outside the room/field/other location. For example, Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers mysteries. Every story takes place inside a drawing room. No movement outside the room, and all dialogue.
 

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I guess I'm still stuck wondering what, in the context of this thread, dialog heavy means. Is it meant in a qualitative or quantitative sense? I think I was taking it as a quantitative meaning, as in, can novels where more of the text is dedicated to dialog than average (whatever the average is across all novels) work, but others meant it qualitatively.

If the it's the latter, there's not really any objective way to know if you have too much. If most of your betas tell you, "These people really need to shut up and do something," it's probably a sign, though. Whether or not Melville (I don't remember much dialog at all in Moby Dick, though, just pages, and pages of very boring description and exposition), or Hemingway, or Asimov, or Leonard or some other famous writer has books that are mostly dialog is irrelevant to whether or not it's the right thing for your own story.
 
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Samsonet

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For what it's worth, the Puzzle Lady series really does have pages with nothing but dialogue. I'd think that a novel that has a certain amount of pages(/pages' worth) of dialogue could be objectively labeled dialogue-heavy. Don't ask me what amount that is, though. I'm still trying to catch up on algebra.
 

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Hi Roxxxsmom,

To me personally, "dialogue-heavy" is qualitative in the sense of what is the non-dialogue stuff that happens. If this "other half" is made up of nuances of body language and people looking out of windows and rain gurgling in the gutter, than this other half is merely atmospherics enveloping the dialogues. The dialogues are the core, the spine, the motor driving the book forward.

If, on the other hand, the core, spine, motor is the action; the plot is driven by chases and shootouts and twists and doublecrosses and things going boom, then it's the dialogues that are atmospherics enveloping the action--it's an "plot-driven" book, even if dialogues take up 70% of the page's space.

On the quantitative front, I'd first use the word search program to locate the "saids" and their alternatives, then do manual job on the untagged dialogues.

Further, there are the character thoughts, the inner dialogues, the narrator-provided back-stories--these combine into a third stool-leg that balances the whole deal (the fourth being physical descriptions of people, houses, mountains, etc.). If these thoughts and narrations are all or mostly catering to the action plot--it's X, if these are mostly atmospherics around the actionless interaction between the characters--it's Y.
 
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