Shut Up: Knowing when your writing has too much dialogue

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. First of all, I hope you all had a wonderful weekend, and that you enjoyed your Easter Sunday. I got to spend the day playing board games with my family, which was so much fun (I won Catan!). I also want to wish a happy birthday to my mum, even though it’s a day late and I got to spend all day yesterday with her anyway. She’s such an amazing person, a fantabulous mother, and I love her oodles and caboodles (you would too, if you knew her). So, happy birthday, Mum!

And now that I’ve spent too many words on my intro, let’s talk about…

Gratuitous Talking

As you know, we’ve been spending this month talking about editing our first drafts, polishing them to a lovely shine, and training our eye to find things that just don’t belong. This is one of those things.

There are times, in our writing, where we use dialogue as a crutch. There are times when, to move the story forward, we have our characters have a conversation that no one would ever have in a million years, just to get the story to be where we want it.

And you need to train your eye to find those times, and remove them.

Personally, I’m also guilty of adding dialogue for the sake of my word count. I generally try to make my scenes even lengths with each other (or work it out so each chapter ends up around the same length), but sometimes this means that I need a few extra words here or there to make the scene match or fulfill the length I need from it... and I tend to use dialogue for it. 

Don’t do that. Don’t be me. Because I always have to go back in and cut it, and for some reason I still haven’t taught myself to just not write like that in the first place.

Dialogue is one of those things that draws people’s eye. If there’s dialogue on the page, a lot of readers (myself included, sometimes) will skim the exposition before it just to get to that piece of dialogue. Often forgetting that to make sense of that dialogue, we need to read the exposition… but that’s beside the point.

Point is, your dialogue needs to have specific meaning within it. It can’t just be there to be there. Dialogue has to have a sharper meaning, a specificity to it that exposition doesn’t necessarily need to have at all times, because dialogue will draw the eye of your reader, and it needs to be pointed. It needs to be necessary.

I know, I know, some of those conversations your characters had were really fun and helped you to get to know your characters—but does that dialogue need to be there, the way that it is right now, in order to move the story forward? If not, then it might not need to be there (of course, if it’s a pivotal way for your reader to get to know your character, then it might actually need to be there, too—but you know, it could also be moved or split into a few scenes, couldn't it?).

There’s a delicate balance, as with everything else in editing. You need to train your eye to find what’s necessary, to see what pieces of dialogue you need and what ones can be cut. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Me? I’ve gotten to the point where I cut dialogue like crazy, because it’s not doing much of anything in the story.

You’ll get there too. You will.

[love]

{Rani Divine}