It was my
impression that Elmore Leonard, one of my favorite crime fiction writers,
seemed to tilt heavily toward dialogue (as do I), though he was declaratively frugal across both categories. In my memory, his novels live through his characters
and their street-edged exchanges.
I tend to use
physical description to give the reader a means for framing a scene, but I
prefer to drive action with dialogue. Credible dialogue is crucial for me to
believe in a character. Lacking that, I fall out of the story’s rhythm, find
myself questioning the author. Overuse of physical description
of setting, no matter how poetically or enchantingly rendered, separates me
from the thrust of the story. I tend to catch myself beginning to speedread (I
don’t want to but it happens) with overuse of scenery description. Example: The
author, Kem Nunn, an excellent writer and story teller, in The Dogs of Winter, would wax eloquent for pages on the collision
of weather and wave action per surfing – and lose me. I’d find myself
speedreading to get back to the characters.
It’s as if
there’s an optimal tempo for me to devour a story. Too much of anything can
disrupt my focus, but more likely if details dominate dialogue. Permit me to
stress that if too little is offered in scene-shaping details that elicit
sensory engagement, that’s also detrimental to reading pleasure. But again, it
is dialogue that enables me to identify with character, evokes my compassion
for that creation on a page, and gives me a sense of that imagined life. When I
find myself caring for a character, reaching to comprehend his or her
motivations, I will remember the
story.
As I stated in
the opening line of this blog, my sense of balance between dialogue and detail
is debatable. I recall years ago at a
writer’s conference in Durham, North Carolina, a particular writer, in his
general criticism, wanted more detail, not just the telling detail, to paint a scene in his mind. Though I couldn’t
bring myself to say it, such was the volume of his detailed descriptions of
setting (I thought of Proust’s Swann’s
Way), I became numb to his characters and, ultimately, the story. To be
fair, his story was not crime fiction but more a scarcely concealed memoir as
fiction. Perhaps the story was so personal to him, there was no other way to
write it.
Balance.
