The problem is this stuff gets boring when that's all there is. The reader will follow an interesting character anywhere, as long as there's plenty of action and dialogue in the story. What you want to do is anchor as much of your narrative as possible within the context of a scene so it's not hanging out there on the perimeter in a vacuum. If there's something important you through narrative, find a way to create a scene and get your characters interacting, then weave the narrative into the scene.
So this time, we're going to approach things from the opposite direction. Instead of weaving the dialogue into the narrative, we're going to weave the narrative into the dialogue. Check out the following scene of dialogue, first without narrative, then with narrative.
Without narrative:
"Honey, I really think we should stop and ask where Dover Street is."
"Not necessary, sweetheart. I know where I'm going."
"Then why have we been circling this neighborhood for the last 45 minutes? It only took us 20 minutes last time Bob and Sue invited us over for dinner."
"That's because we had written directions in front of us."
"Why are you so stubborn? What's the big deal with stopping at that 7-11 right there and asking where—"
"The people at those 7-iis never speak English, that's one good reason. It's a waste of time."
"And driving around like this isn't?"
"No, because we're getting closer."
"We are—watch out! You just turned down a one-way street, you idiot!"
"There's the house. Told you I'd find it."
With narrative:
"Honey, I really think we should stop and ask where Dover Street is." This is only the third time I'd made this suggestion.
"Not necessary, sweetheart. I know where I'm going."
"Then why have we been circling this neighborhood for the last 45 minutes? It only took us 20 minutes last time Bob and Sue invited us over for dinner." Why did he have to be so stubborn, affirming the stereotype about men not being able to ask for directions? Why couldn't he ever be just a little bit unpredictable?
"That's because we had written directions in front of us."
"Why are you so stubborn?" We passed Elm Street again—the third time now. "What's the big deal with stopping at that 7-11 right there and asking where—"
"The people at those 7-iis never speak English, that's one good reason. It's a waste of time."
"And driving around like this isn't?" Juniper Street again.
"No, because we're getting closer."
Closer. Right. We'd passed this same intersection at least five times now in our scenic tour of Bob and Sue's neighborhood. The truth was I wasn't even sure this was their neighborhood. I didn't know whether to keep arguing with him or let him drive us around until midnight.
"Sure, we are—watch out! You just turned down a one-way street, you idiot!" Was he even awake?
"There's the house. Told you I'd find it."
When you find yourself writing a scene that ends up top-heavy with dialogue and you need to weave in some narrative, simply put yourself into the character's situation and imagine what she is thinking and observing in the moment. You're the actor in a movie and you have to play all the parts. Be aware that any narrative thrown into a scene of dialogue slows it down a bit, so place it strategically in places where the tension isn't affected by a line or two of narrative. In the above scene, we get to know the female character in a way that we don't in the dialogue-only scene.
weaving dialogue, narrative, and action
Most of the time, we want to balance our scenes using all three elements: dialogue, action, and narrative. This is one reason you want to put your character in a scene with other characters as often as possible. Scenes that are woven engage the reader at an emotional level so much more effectively than scenes that are only dialogue, only narrative, or only action.
Following is an example of a well-woven scene from Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees. In the following scene of this literary novel about the civil rights movement, Kidd seems to want to talk to us about the risk of getting "stung" if we want to be true beekeepers. If we want to make a difference in the world, we must take risks, and loving something is enough reason to do it. Rather than "preach" to us through narrative alone, the author blends the scene using dialogue, action, and narrative, pulling the reader in.
Rescuing bees took us the entire morning. Driving back into remote corners of the woods where there were barely roads, we would come upon twenty-five beehives up on slats like a little lost city tucked back in there. We lifted the covers and filled the feeders with sugar water. Earlier we'd spooned dry sugar into our pockets, and now, just as a bonus, we sprinkled it on the feeding rims.
I managed to get stung on my wrist while replacing a lid onto a hive box. August scraped out the stinger.
"I was sending them love," I said, feeling betrayed.
August said, "Hot weather makes the bees out of sorts, I don't care how much love you send them." She pulled a small bottle of olive oil and bee pollen from her free pocket and rubbed my skin — her patented remedy. It was something I'd hoped never to test out.
"Count yourself initiated," she said. "You can't be a true bee-keeper without getting stung."
A true beekeeper. The words caused a fullness in me, and right at that moment an explosion of blackbirds lifted off the ground in a clearing a short distance away and filled up the whole sky. I said to myself, Will wonders never cease? I would add that to my list of careers. A writer, an English teacher, and a beekeeper.
"Do you think I could keep bees one day?" I asked.
August said, "Didn't you tell me this past week one of the things you loved was bees and honey? Now, if that's so, you'll be a fine beekeeper. Actually, you
can be bad at something, Lily, but if you love doing it, that will be enough."
The sting shot pain all the way to my elbow, causing me to marvel at how much punishment a minuscule creature can inflict. I'm prideful enough to say I didn't complain. After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it. I just dived back into the riptide of saving bees.
How did Kidd know when and where to put what? This is largely an intuitive process, and I'm guessing she didn't do a lot of thinking about how she was weaving the elements of fiction as she was writing her first draft. You have to move inside of your characters in order to do this. You can't be thinking about how to do it, at least not while writing the first draft. During the revision process, when reading back through the story, you can see better when a scene is top-heavy with dialogue, narrative, or action. The perfectly balanced scene has a rhythm to it; you'll learn to recognize it when it's there.
And when it's not. The scene heavy with dialogue for too long a period of time can begin to feel unreal, like you're simply listening in on talking heads. Without active images or character observations of setting or mood, it feels like a radio interview with the sound effects missing. Likewise, a scene top-heavy with action can also feel unreal because it's unlikely that characters doing something—anything at all—would not be talking during the activity. Finally, the scene top-heavy with narrative, as we've discussed above, can simply be boring, as it is in real life when a person rambles on and on and on about a subject. Even if it's a subject in which we're interested, the rambling narrative can put us to sleep.
So learn to watch for any scene in which you've used only one of the three elements—dialogue, action, or narrative—and ask yourself if it feels real and emotionally engages the reader.
when not to weave
Having said all that, learning not to weave is as important as learning to weave. Is it ever a good thing to create a scene with only dialogue? Only narrative? Only action?
One reason not to weave is because you want to highlight a particular character trait in your viewpoint character or focus on something specific that the characters are talking about. You don't want the scene cluttered, the reader distr
acted, or the pace slowed by action or narrative. You know how
sometimes when someone is telling you a story, the setting, the other people around you, everything just kind of fades away, and you're intent only on what the other person is saying? This is what it's like when you cut away action and narrative and leave only your characters' spoken words.
Picture your characters in a movie and the camera is closing in, coming closer and closer to your characters, their facial expressions, their very beings. You can achieve this same effect with dialogue-only scenes.
Check out this scene in The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter. The viewpoint character, Bradley, works at a coffee shop called Jitters. His co-worker, Chloe, asks him what's the worst thing that ever happened to him. Up until that time, the author had woven dialogue, narrative, and action into a nicely balanced scene, but it was time to speed things up. Bradley starts to tell Chloe about how he and some buddies were in the cathedral at Notre Dame in Paris. The story's getting long and Chloe tells him to hurry it along. What
the author wants to highlight here, it would seem, is that Bradley actually thinks the worst thing he's ever done in his life is knock over a bunch of candles in a cathedral. The dialogue focuses on this alone.
"Let me finish this story... And because my hand was shaking, I reached down to the holder, this freestanding holder or candelabra or whatever of votive candles, and somehow, I don't know how this happened, my hand caused this holder of candles, all these small flames, all these souls, to fall over, and when it fell over, all the candles, lit for the sake of a soul somewhere, there must have been a hundred of them, all of them fell to the floor, because of me, and all of them went out. And you know what the nun did, Chloe, the nun who was standing there?"
"She spoke French?"
"No. She could have, but she didn't. No, what she did was, she screamed."
"Wow."
"Yeah, the nun screamed in my face. I felt like."
"You felt like pretty bad, Mr. S. I can believe it. But you know, Mr. S, those were just candles. They weren't really souls. That's all superstition, that soul stuff."
"Oh, I know."
"No kidding, Mr. S, you shouldn't be so totally morbid. I thought when you were telling me about the worst thing you ever did, it'd be, like, beating up a blind guy and stealing his car."
"No, I never did that."
"Oscar did, once. You should get him to tell you about it."
"Okay."
"He was drunk, though." She prettily touches her perfect hair. "And the guy wasn't really blind. He just said he was, to take advantage of people. It was, like, a scam. Oscar saw through all that. It's nine o'clock now, Boss. We should open up."
"Right." And I unlock the curtain, and touch a switch, and slowly the curtain rises on the working day. The candles are nothing to Chloe; they're just candles. I feel instantly better. Bless her.
The scene wouldn't have had the same impact if the author had woven action and narrative throughout the dialogue. This is a neurotic character, and this fast-paced scene of dialogue shows the extent of his neurosis, especially compared to Chloe's explanation of the candles being just candles.
Because this part of the scene is only dialogue, we get the full impact of his neurosis and how it expresses itself in his life. When you isolate a character's dialogue, if the reader is paying attention, he'll become privy to the character's personality and motives in a way that's not possible in the woven scene just because there's too much going on.
Pacing is probably the most common fiction element to pay attention to when considering when to and when not to weave dialogue, narrative, and action. If you're creating a fast-paced conflict scene between two or more people, you might do well to consider only dialogue, at least for parts of it. Maybe your characters have just entered into an argument and you want to speed up the scene. In Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, the young viewpoint character, Dolores, is fed up with her mother, who has been grieving over the loss of her baby for over four years and acquired all kinds of obsessive-compulsive disorders, the most recent being an obsession with her new parakeet, Petey. Dolores has already been narrating a lot of this, but now it's time for her to act out her feelings. In a scene of dialogue only, the author quickly shows what Dolores has taken pages to tell us.
I hated Petey—fantasized about his flying accidentally out a window or into the electric fan so that his spell over Ma would be broken. My not kissing Ma anymore was a conscious decision reached one night at bedtime with the purpose of hurting her.
"Well, you're stingy tonight," she said when I turned my face away from her goodnight kiss.
"I'm not kissing you anymore, period," I told her. "All day long you kiss that bird right on its filthy beak."
"I do not."
"You do so. Maybe you want to catch bird diseases, but I don't."
"Petey's mouth is probably cleaner than my mouth and yours put together, Dolores" was her argument.
"That's a laugh."
"Well, it's true. I read it in my bird book."
"Next thing you know, you'll be French-kissing it."
"Never mind French-kissing. What do you know about that kind of stuff? You watch that mouth of yours, young lady."
"That's exactly what I'm doing," I said. I clamped my hand over my mouth and stuffed my whole face into the pillow.
As you can see, this passage is very effective without a bunch of narrative bogging down the moment. The dialogue shows Dolores' true attitude toward Petey, but more importantly, toward her mother. Whereas it can take the protagonist pages to tell us something in narrative, a scene of dialogue can quickly show us through that character's own words said out loud. Narrative explains and dialogue blurts out. We'll talk more about pacing in chapter eight.
Obviously, when a character is alone, you can't weave unless he's the kind of person who talks to himself a lot. As I mentioned above, you want to try to create scenes with more than one character in them. It's always more interesting for the reader when characters are interacting than when they're thinking and we're only reading their thoughts.
The same reasons not to weave hold true when writing scenes with only narrative or only action. You want to focus on something in your character's mind or describe something that would only sound contrived in dialogue, so you use straight narrative. Or the action needs to drive the scene forward because it's intense and emotional, and your characters just wouldn't be talking during this time (action). Sometimes, as in real life, there's just nothing to say at the moment. Always, always, always let your characters lead you.
striking a balance
I can't give you any hard and fast rules about when to and when not to weave. To weave well is to find your story's rhythm. There are a few questions you can ask yourself about your story, especially in the rewrite stage, that can help you know which elements are most effective for a particular scene.
• Is the story moving a little too slowly, and do I need to speed things up? (Use dialogue.)
• Is it time to give the reader some background on the characters so they're more sympathetic? (Use narrative, dialogue, or a combination of the two.)
• Do I have too many dialogue scenes in a row? (Use action or narrative.)
• Are my characters constantly confiding in others about things they should only be pondering in their minds? (Use narrative.)
• Likewise, are my characters alone in their heads when my characters in conversation would be more effective and lively? (Use dialogue.)
• Is my story top-heavy in any way at all—too much dialogue, too much narrative, too much action? (Insert more of the elements that are missing.)
• Are my characters providing too many background details as they're talking to each other? (Use narrative.)
Whether we're using dialogue, action, or narrative to move the story forward, any or all three of these elements are doing double duty—revealing our characters' motives. To understand a character's motive is to understand
the character. In the next chapter, we'll discover how our story's dialogue can reveal motive in a way that's natural and authentic, because whether we're aware of it or not, we reveal our own motives all the time in our everyday lives.
Dialogue into action. Following is a straight action scene with no dialogue or narrative-sort of like a cookie recipe without the sugar. Carson's an outgoing guy, but you'd never know it the way this scene is written. Weave appropriate dialogue that shows his extroverted personality into this scene:
Carson backed his bike up to the curb and climbed off, setting his helmet carefully on the left handlebar. Two muscular bikers in leathers stood by the door, making no effort to hide their disdain for his Honda 450. He ignored them and strode into the tavern, his hands shoved deeply into the pockets of his jeans. They followed.
He made his way up to the bar and ordered a beer. A blonde sitting by herself at the end of the bar motioned for him to join her. He sat down beside her, but then decided to grab an ashtray off one of the tables behind him. He got up and moved toward the table but suddenly found his way blocked by the bigger of the two bikers. He stepped to the biker's right. The biker stepped also.
Carson shrugged and turned around, then felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder. Carson jerked away and before he knew what was happening, a small group of bikers approached him from the front.
He quickly sized up the situation, turned and threw his beer at the biker who had grabbed him, and ran out the door.
Narrative into dialogue. Following is a straight dialogue scene with no action or narrative. Using either of the two characters' viewpoints (but choose only one), weave some narrative into this scene. Watch how it becomes more three-dimensional as the reader has the opportunity to get inside of the viewpoint character's head.
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