The biggest challenge a book can face is the lack of a narrator’s voice. Novels don’t run on 98 percent dialogue. Talking and nothing else just doesn’t move a reader fast enough through the time frame of the story. You don’t want to write a radio play, and that’s what a book without a narrator’s voice looks like.
You may need to pull lots of your book out of dialogue. The scene-laden style forces us to watch speeches closely and listen hard just to discover the things that have happened in the past. I lose the sense of what’s most important, and so the pacing slows.
Dialogue hides the author. Its mirror twin is narrative, but it doesn’t take you out of your story. It’s like a voiceover in a film, but narrative is essential in a book. Not so much in a movie.
Knowing the differences between narrative and dialogue’s benefits helps. A voiceover explains things and provides interior thought. You learn the why, plus what’s at stake, by using what what a movie would call voiceover. It’s the one thing that novels do 100 times better than movies. Narrative is your voiceover.
Readers need your voice in your story as much as the chit-chat and long explanations that you might be driving into dialogue. This might not be an easy lift for you to move into novel-only skills, but it’s necessary. Lots of authors kick this can down the road, to ill effect. Sometimes fatal, depending on how much of their book is in dialogue.
Being dialogue-bound is like sitting on a ski run and never getting out of the lift chair. You go up and down the mountain, but oh so slowly. All showing and no telling gets exhausting. IT’S AS IF THE STORY WAS BEING RELATED IN ALL CAPS. When you can do whole chapters without anything but spoken dialogue, or the action related to the speech, I can’t hear the storyteller’s voice.
Just so you know, people speak in fragments. Listen to see. Spell checkers warn you that you’ve got fragments in your writing, the incomplete sentences or short phrases. Not so bad, really, especially in speech. Use fragments to lift the pacing of your scenes which have dialogue. Stay away from long sentences. Make sentence fragments a regular habit for your speakers.
Dialogue should reveal something about the characters, relationships, or themes of the book. Dialogue should show us people trying to get what they want using words. They should always have an angle. Watch out for banter. Characters can be witty and reveal themselves — but a book that believes too much in the charms of conversational exchange makes a tedious mistake.
