Blog 36 Balancing Dialogue and Description

 

In fiction, particularly crime fiction, there is a (debatable) balance to be drawn between dialogue and physical description. On this occasion, I’d like to focus on that balance.

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.