McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Help. Thoughts?

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meg_evonne:
I'm working on an ensemble piece with several characters. It's flowing nicely, but I've noticed something unusual. Should I be concerned?

Normally, I need to work hard to get white space into the black space, i.e. more dialog, less exposition.

This 1st POV, YA contemporary mystery work is the reverse. The dialog is heavy in places. I'm not sure that's good. I do enjoy that the different character voices are fun to bounce around as I drive the action forward.

I can't get a read on if its a good idea or not. Your thoughts?

Kali:
Honestly, I can't say. I don't read YA. It might be common to the genre, and if it is then you're golden. So I'd say scout out other YA books, especially mysteries, and see how heavy the genre tends to be in dialogue. You might even want to rely on numbers and not your eye for things, since we tend to be poor judges of some of that stuff. ;) Get a good sampling of the number of lines of dialogue. 10 lines of dialogue in 100 lines or something. Then do the same for your manuscript. That should give you a fairly accurate idea of where you are, despite being a kind of boring exercise.

Wordmaker:
Well-written dialogue can really help your pacing take off. YA in particular tends to have a lot of dialogue and be much less heavy on exposition. In fact, based on conversations with my editor, I'd go so far as to say that if you can work that dialogue and keep it engaging, you're better off focusing on that.

arianne:
Can't be certain without looking at the actual story in question, but in general I would say that's a good thing. Younger readers tend to skip long passages of description and just go for the dialogue, and only come back to the description bits if they find they've missed something later.

You might have to work to make each character's voice is distinct though, if there's a lot of talking.

Paynesgrey:
I think you need to consider the nature of the dialogue.  Technically, dialogue is "action."  People tend to home in on quotatoin marks when reading.  What I would wonder is the dialogue interaction between characters, or is it leaning towards Silent Bob style monologues and soliloquys?  Those can be engaging, but run a great risk of being Exposition In Quotation Marks.

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