How to Balance a Narrative & Dialogue in Writing a Novel

Think about narrative and dialogue that will entice your readers.

When you set out to write a novel you must think about how you intend to develop an engaging story that keeps the narrative and dialogue in balance. If the narrative and dialogue are not balanced, you risk boring your readers with too much of one and not enough of the other. An effective novel offers a fair distribution of both, but weaving them together requires strategy and skill.

First Draft

Every novel begins with a first draft, but the first draft is hardly ever the final draft. If you want to get a feel for how narrative and dialogue can become balanced or imbalanced, write the first draft chapter by chapter. After each chapter, stop to read what you've written so far and assess the balance. Visualize the pages and ask yourself whether you have pages upon pages of just narrative, or of just dialogue. Reading the first draft out loud can help you hear how it flows in order to determine if it is balanced. You can consider your first draft an exercise in narrative and dialogue balancing, and then polish it up the second time around.

Appropriate Usage

There may be times throughout your novel or chapters where it's appropriate to have more dialogue than narrative, or more narrative than dialogue. For example, when it comes to portraying the relationship that the protagonist has with other characters in the story it is appropriate to use dialogue for scenic action and stick with light narrative. An instance in which you would use more narrative than dialogue, however, is if you were to give readers insight into the protagonist's thoughts and feelings, or if you wanted to paint a description of the protagonist's environment. Using more dialogue or more narrative is a strategy that can be punctuated throughout the novel, but be sure that the entire novel doesn't rely on one more than the other.

Pacing

Pacing refers to the pace, or speed, of your scene within a novel. The pace of a novel is determined by the plot and the tone that the author wishes to set for readers. Pacing also impacts the balance of narrative and dialogue. For instance, a scene between two people having an argument can be effectively portrayed with a fast-paced tone that is captured by quick dialogue between the characters. If you want a slow-paced scene, you will want to use more narrative than dialogue.

Sequencing

Something to pay attention to in your novel is the sequence of events, and whether or not you have too many fast-paced or slow-paced scenes in a row. While it may be appropriate for you to use more narrative or more dialogue with certain scenes, it's important to break up the sequence so that you don't end up with five chapters of mainly narrative. One way to remedy this is to include more dialogue in between the chapters or rearrange the sequence of events to a flashback or a story that engages the reader.

References

• Writer's Digest: How to Balance Action, Narrative and Dialogue in Your Novel