Writing Meta: Dialog and Narration - the eternal balancing act
Ever read a story (pro or fan, it doesn't matter) where the characters talked a lot but seemed to be almost floating in the ether? I've read stories that were almost theatrical in style with lots of dialog, minimal 'stage direction' and I've got to tell you. With a few exceptions, no matter how much I might have enjoyed them, I would have enjoyed them a great deal more if there'd been more balance between narration and dialog.
I spent some of my school years in theater. I read more plays and monologues and dialogs than you can shake a stick at (and really, why would you want to?). The beauty of the sparse narration in that format is that it gives the director free reign. Playwrights vary in how much description and "blocking" (where actors are on the stage and how they get there, for you non-theater types) they include, but the lifeblood of a play is composed of plot and characters with the dialog as the tool used to present them. The director's job is to take that and translate/interpret it into live action for the audience. The director becomes, IMO, the de facto narrator of the play. He uses the playwright's vision as a guide, but *his* choices are what animate the story and give it color and texture and substance.
This is why we use narration in fiction. Writers take on the role of playwright, director, lighting director, prop master, set designer, actor, orchestra and we even have to sweep up afterward. :-) We are truly jacks of all trades and *damn* aren't we proud of that! The only problem is, we don't get all the cool toys those folks use. We only get to use words.
Luckily for us, words are cool toys, too.
Most of us are pretty savvy when it comes to dialog. We know we need it so characters can interact with each other and pass on plot points (or not, which can be a plot point of it's own) and, naturally, to inform the reader. Let's listen in on that quintessential couple, John and Mary as they talk about dinner:
JOHN: Mary, that was wonderful! I've never liked meatloaf before!
MARY: I'd hoped you'd like it. It's my grandmother's recipe.
JOHN: I owe her one, then, because this was great.
MARY: Just wait til you see what I made for dessert!
So, there there we have it. Mary served meatloaf, made according to her grandmother's recipe, and John liked it when he'd never liked any other meatloaf he'd ever had. Don't know what Mary made for dessert, but it sounds like she thinks he's going to be impressed (I'm holding out for a chocolate meringue pie, myself). Even just the raw dialog tells us quite a bit about what's going on, and if this was an essay on dialog, we could dissect it for meaning, but that's another essay. Since this is about narration, let's take a good long look at what we *don't* know about this scene.
There have been times, when I'm working on a story, that I'll get sequences of dialog come to me that look just about like the above dinner conversation. I quickly type them up and then have to go back and start adding everything I 'see', 'hear' and 'know', in my head, to the scene. This is where my inner director comes out to play. Because, as mentioned before, the dialog is only part of the story. I'm sure most of you have already started adding your own narration to the scene. I bet a lot of you have added it in several different ways, too. Remember, *what* someone says is only as meaningful as *how* they say it and *why* they say it. Dialog alone can't convey that. This is the province of narration.
Consider the fine art of sarcasm. "Yeah, right". You *know* you heard that echoing in your head in a manner that indicates the speaker was *not* in agreement, even though the words said he was. Yet, it's not difficult to say "Yeah, right" and have it mean *exactly* what it sounds like.
Let's take another look at the dinner scene.
"Mary, that was wonderful!" John set his silverware down on his plate and leaned back from the table. "I've never liked meatloaf before!"
"I'd hoped you'd like it." Mary stifled a sigh of relief as she smiled. "It's my grandmother's recipe." Her grandmother had always told her the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. Maybe Granny Edna knew what she was talking about.
"I owe her one, then, because this was great." John hoped Mary would like the pot roast he had planned for their dinner on Saturday night. She was a much better cook than he was, but he was determined to show her he could pull his weight.
"Just wait til you see what I made for dessert!" Mary started gathering up the dishes and mentally crossed her fingers hoping that her date wasn't allergic to chocolate.
*Lots* more information here, now. First off, John really did like the meatloaf. (Fess up, folks - how many of your mental narrations included him lying through his teeth to get laid? :-) Mary's an old-fashioned kinda gal, at least somewhat and John is more modern, expecting that he'll at least take on some of the cooking duties in their relationship. My impression from the scene is that they're both spouse hunting, but who knows? Just this little bit gives us basic motives (pleasing the other) and shows us their words really do reflect their emotions and intentions.
But is this enough?
If this were a class and I were a teacher, I'd 'assign' you all to produce a 500 - 1000 word scene with just that dialog. No other words spoken, but you could color their meaning with the characters' emotions, their actions, their tone, the setting, whatever your little hearts desired. But since this isn't a class and I'm not a teacher, I'll just leave it to you to consider as an exercise.
(Extra credit for doing two and ending up with two completely different Johns and Marys, based solely on the narration. ;-)
What hasn't been touched yet is where they are, what it looks like, what it *feels* like and sounds like and smells like. I've got John and Mary sitting on a black stage at an undefined table in undefined chairs using undefined tableware. Is it the living room/bedroom/kitchen of a studio apartment on lower Broadway just where the subway turns into a surface train and rattles the windows every twenty minutes? Is it an ultra-modern dining room just off a high tech chrome and slate kitchen in a trendy home in Seattle with a fog horn sounding in the distance? (Can you even hear fog horns in trendy neighborhoods in Seattle? :-)
Light or dark, summer or winter, rich or poor, young or old, and so on. None of that comes through in bare dialog or even in my slightly expanded scene, nor should it. Not directly (at least not most of the time). Those are the kinds of clues people get visually or aurally, not verbally. Even if you've never bought a man's suit in your life, you can likely stand four men up in Men's Wearhouse specials and pick out the fifth man wearing Armani and say, "he's got more money than they do". You may not *know* he's wearing Armani (I wouldn't), but you'll be able to tell the difference in far more subtle ways.
How you do it will depend a great deal on the conventions of your genre. Some do fairly lavish scene setting right of the bat and that's expected by the readers. Some take a far more minimalist approach, salting the narration with subtle clues as to what's what (that's my preferred style). But no matter how you do it, it gives your readers a far richer reading experience since they can place the characters in their setting, rather than having them kinda floating along hoping they won't bump into hidden walls. There's nothing worse than having a character come out and say, "here, let me hand you this mysterious green and orange sphere that I just tripped over". Have them *do* it, instead. Narration is the key to the writer's mantra: Show, don't tell. Just beware of the evil demon, Infodump, lurking in the shadows, but, like dialog, that's another essay for when the mood strikes me.
I spent some of my school years in theater. I read more plays and monologues and dialogs than you can shake a stick at (and really, why would you want to?). The beauty of the sparse narration in that format is that it gives the director free reign. Playwrights vary in how much description and "blocking" (where actors are on the stage and how they get there, for you non-theater types) they include, but the lifeblood of a play is composed of plot and characters with the dialog as the tool used to present them. The director's job is to take that and translate/interpret it into live action for the audience. The director becomes, IMO, the de facto narrator of the play. He uses the playwright's vision as a guide, but *his* choices are what animate the story and give it color and texture and substance.
This is why we use narration in fiction. Writers take on the role of playwright, director, lighting director, prop master, set designer, actor, orchestra and we even have to sweep up afterward. :-) We are truly jacks of all trades and *damn* aren't we proud of that! The only problem is, we don't get all the cool toys those folks use. We only get to use words.
Luckily for us, words are cool toys, too.
Most of us are pretty savvy when it comes to dialog. We know we need it so characters can interact with each other and pass on plot points (or not, which can be a plot point of it's own) and, naturally, to inform the reader. Let's listen in on that quintessential couple, John and Mary as they talk about dinner:
JOHN: Mary, that was wonderful! I've never liked meatloaf before!
MARY: I'd hoped you'd like it. It's my grandmother's recipe.
JOHN: I owe her one, then, because this was great.
MARY: Just wait til you see what I made for dessert!
So, there there we have it. Mary served meatloaf, made according to her grandmother's recipe, and John liked it when he'd never liked any other meatloaf he'd ever had. Don't know what Mary made for dessert, but it sounds like she thinks he's going to be impressed (I'm holding out for a chocolate meringue pie, myself). Even just the raw dialog tells us quite a bit about what's going on, and if this was an essay on dialog, we could dissect it for meaning, but that's another essay. Since this is about narration, let's take a good long look at what we *don't* know about this scene.
There have been times, when I'm working on a story, that I'll get sequences of dialog come to me that look just about like the above dinner conversation. I quickly type them up and then have to go back and start adding everything I 'see', 'hear' and 'know', in my head, to the scene. This is where my inner director comes out to play. Because, as mentioned before, the dialog is only part of the story. I'm sure most of you have already started adding your own narration to the scene. I bet a lot of you have added it in several different ways, too. Remember, *what* someone says is only as meaningful as *how* they say it and *why* they say it. Dialog alone can't convey that. This is the province of narration.
Consider the fine art of sarcasm. "Yeah, right". You *know* you heard that echoing in your head in a manner that indicates the speaker was *not* in agreement, even though the words said he was. Yet, it's not difficult to say "Yeah, right" and have it mean *exactly* what it sounds like.
Let's take another look at the dinner scene.
"Mary, that was wonderful!" John set his silverware down on his plate and leaned back from the table. "I've never liked meatloaf before!"
"I'd hoped you'd like it." Mary stifled a sigh of relief as she smiled. "It's my grandmother's recipe." Her grandmother had always told her the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. Maybe Granny Edna knew what she was talking about.
"I owe her one, then, because this was great." John hoped Mary would like the pot roast he had planned for their dinner on Saturday night. She was a much better cook than he was, but he was determined to show her he could pull his weight.
"Just wait til you see what I made for dessert!" Mary started gathering up the dishes and mentally crossed her fingers hoping that her date wasn't allergic to chocolate.
*Lots* more information here, now. First off, John really did like the meatloaf. (Fess up, folks - how many of your mental narrations included him lying through his teeth to get laid? :-) Mary's an old-fashioned kinda gal, at least somewhat and John is more modern, expecting that he'll at least take on some of the cooking duties in their relationship. My impression from the scene is that they're both spouse hunting, but who knows? Just this little bit gives us basic motives (pleasing the other) and shows us their words really do reflect their emotions and intentions.
But is this enough?
If this were a class and I were a teacher, I'd 'assign' you all to produce a 500 - 1000 word scene with just that dialog. No other words spoken, but you could color their meaning with the characters' emotions, their actions, their tone, the setting, whatever your little hearts desired. But since this isn't a class and I'm not a teacher, I'll just leave it to you to consider as an exercise.
(Extra credit for doing two and ending up with two completely different Johns and Marys, based solely on the narration. ;-)
What hasn't been touched yet is where they are, what it looks like, what it *feels* like and sounds like and smells like. I've got John and Mary sitting on a black stage at an undefined table in undefined chairs using undefined tableware. Is it the living room/bedroom/kitchen of a studio apartment on lower Broadway just where the subway turns into a surface train and rattles the windows every twenty minutes? Is it an ultra-modern dining room just off a high tech chrome and slate kitchen in a trendy home in Seattle with a fog horn sounding in the distance? (Can you even hear fog horns in trendy neighborhoods in Seattle? :-)
Light or dark, summer or winter, rich or poor, young or old, and so on. None of that comes through in bare dialog or even in my slightly expanded scene, nor should it. Not directly (at least not most of the time). Those are the kinds of clues people get visually or aurally, not verbally. Even if you've never bought a man's suit in your life, you can likely stand four men up in Men's Wearhouse specials and pick out the fifth man wearing Armani and say, "he's got more money than they do". You may not *know* he's wearing Armani (I wouldn't), but you'll be able to tell the difference in far more subtle ways.
How you do it will depend a great deal on the conventions of your genre. Some do fairly lavish scene setting right of the bat and that's expected by the readers. Some take a far more minimalist approach, salting the narration with subtle clues as to what's what (that's my preferred style). But no matter how you do it, it gives your readers a far richer reading experience since they can place the characters in their setting, rather than having them kinda floating along hoping they won't bump into hidden walls. There's nothing worse than having a character come out and say, "here, let me hand you this mysterious green and orange sphere that I just tripped over". Have them *do* it, instead. Narration is the key to the writer's mantra: Show, don't tell. Just beware of the evil demon, Infodump, lurking in the shadows, but, like dialog, that's another essay for when the mood strikes me.