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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: meg_evonne on April 11, 2013, 05:22:34 AM
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I agree with all of the above; in my experience much YA tends to rely heavily on dialogue for its exposition rather than long descriptive passages, which can make a lot of kids bored and impatient.
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Man, I always read all of the book, feeling immersed into it and all ( though if it was a book i really didnt like i just skipped parts or left the book altogether) and felt irritated when friends would be like "yeah i finished it!" and learned they skipped to the dialogue or action scenes.
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My books are dialogue heavy. So long as its action packed, be it, action, high stakes negotiation or political life and death conversations if you keep it real, I say go dialogue heavy. It can totally carry your story.
The Deposed King
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Being able to bounce back and forth with dialogue is a hell of a lot of fun. But since it sounds like you're "new" to having this happen, I would look for these things when reviewing/editing what you've written:
A) Can the reader distinguish who is talking? I occasionally see people who put a line of dialogue down, and IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH put the nonverbal (or even verbal!) response of the other character. That makes the reader pause to figure out who is doing what, and breaks flow. Or, when you have three or more characters, you can end up failing to give enough clues as to who is talking, particularly if two characters talk similarly. I will have a lot of times when I edit my own stuff where I tweak the words *around* dialogue, just to clear up who is speaking or doing what. After I've been away from the work for a while I can spot places where I thought I was clear who was talking when I wrote it, but throw *myself* for a loop on the re-read.
B) Are you keeping the dialogue interesting, without having thesaurus diarrhea?
C) Is the dialogue DOING something? If you really love your characters, it's easy to fall into a "sitcom" trap where your favorites are just quipping at one another and YOU think it's freaking hilarious, but your story isn't really going anywhere with it. Unless you're writing a sitcom, this sort of thing can be an issue if too much of it goes on. I typically flow with ensemble quipping, because it gets me writing and it can be really fun, then go back and strip out bits I don't need.