Examining Styles – Dialogue and Narration

If we had to divide prose into two categories, the two that make the most sense are these: dialogue or narration. If it’s not being spoken by a character, it’s narration.

These two parts are very, very important to the feel of your style. In particular, the way you write them and the ratio between the two. Let’s discuss them shall we?

The Importance of Dialogue

Without dialogue, your characters have no voices. They’re mute. Dialogue allows the readers to hear the story world play out. It provides a way for characters to pass information and gives the reader a break from reading the information of narration.

Without dialogue, prose can feel heavy handed, wordy, and cumbersome. Now, it is possible to write with very little dialogue. It’s done all the time, and quite well. However, dialogue is interesting. Readers like dialogue. They like the chance for imagination. Dialogue breaks from description to give us sounds and voices.

We have to maintain a mental image with our imagination while we also balance the voices of two or three or four or seventy people. It stretches the mind and creates a satisfied feeling in the reader’s exercised imagination.

In addition, dialogue provides white space. If your book is completely narration, the pages are filled with long paragraphs and chunks of text that go on and on without any space for the reader to fill. Dialogue, on the other hand, shortens paragraphs.

It breaks them up.

Sometimes, there are one-word

Lines.

These are followed by longer sentences with stronger vocabulary and feeling that soar with the reader to new heights of description before returning to

Shorter, choppier

Paragraphs

Which provide rest.

Do you see what I did there? I left some white space (well… black space, here). The spaces between the three longer paragraphs gives you space. It gives the reader space. That white space gives their eyes a break and allows them to breathe. More importantly, that is space the reader gets to fill. They become co-creators with you in creating the world.

The Narrative Experience

Narration, on the other hand, gives the reader a baseline for their imagination. It gives them action, motivation, thoughts, and emotions to build off of. If you wrote only dialogue, the reader has nothing to build off of. All they see is voices floating in a formless void. That’s a daunting place for a reader to have to fill.

Instead, you help direct their imagination to the right details. That’s why unexpected details are always superior to cliché ones. Unexpected details fill in the parts of the scene that the reader couldn’t have thought of themselves. Your job isn’t to describe everything, but to create a structure around which your reader can add their own input.

Narration is co-creation.

How does your narrative do this?

First, narrative provides emotion. Emotion is the fuel of story. It fuels conflict when there is conflict, and it carries interest when there is no conflict. Narration conveys the emotions of characters through thoughts, emotional tags, word choice, and character actions.

Secondly, narration provides action. Without action, your story is static. Nothing happens. No one moves, the scene never changes. Action creates a moving picture in your reader’s mind and creates tension, conflict, and consequences. Without action, your story is stuck in a rut of motionlessness.

Finally, narration provides description. Like I mentioned above, unexpected details are the best way to help your reader to build a scene. Another way to help in co-creation is sensory details. Giving your readers tangible senses beyond sight goes a long way in their construction of your story.

Finding the Balance

Now. If both narration and dialogue are important to the reader, how much of each do you put in your book? What ratio?

Is it fifty percent?

Something else?

Is there a magic number?

Here’s the deal: there is a magic number.

That number, however… changes.

In fact, it changes by writer and by book. It can even change by character in a book with multiple characters.

Let me explain:

The ratio of dialogue to narration is dependent on three factors: the last chapter, the current chapter, and the next chapter. If the last chapter was narration heavy, this chapter may need some dialogue to give the reader some white space. Or perhaps this chapter needs more narration to describe the scene so that the next scene can be primarily action and dialogue. Chapters with lots of character interaction require more dialogue than chapters with only one character.

The ratio can also depend on your personal style just as much as it shapes your style. Your use of descriptions to paint emotion in your reader may result in your using more narration than dialogue. Or perhaps you’re better at writing conversations and making voices sound real, such that your ratio is dialogue over narration.

It is important not that you have some arbitrary fraction, but that you find a balance which fits the style your current book is written in. Create the baseline for your reader’s imagination, fill it with vivid, emotional characters, and provide them with noise and action and white space. 

ANNOUNCEMENT: There will be no post on 7/21/17, because my older sister is getting married on the 22nd and I won't have time next week to write up a post for y'all. Any complaints can be taken up with her. ;)

Examining Styles – Purple Prose

For the next few blog posts, I’m going to be writing short posts about different styles and their strengths and witnesses.

They’re going to be short, because I don’t have a lot of time right now.

And they’re about style because style sells the novel. Sure, story is the most important thing in writing, but, but style pulls the reader in, or makes them put the book down.

Before Examination

Before I begin to examine today’s style, I’d like to note a few things: first off, it’s okay to ignore style sometimes. For instance, rough drafts are a great time to not give a crap about style. Rough drafts are about getting the story into words and out of your brain. Once it’s out, you can fiddle with it to your hearts content. No questions asked.

If you wait for the style to be perfect, you’re never going to get the story written.

In addition, it’s also okay to ignore style very late editing. When you’ve already gone through three or four drafts and you’re down to spelling errors and accidental name switches, style isn’t really important.

So when is style important?

Style is important in two places: conceptions and editing. In conception, style gives you the building blocks upon which you write your story. Knowing the basics of how you want to write your story gives you a baseline of how the prose comes out as your write. It allows you to unconsciously assume that style for your story.

In editing, style provides a key foundation for word choice, sentence structure, and prose flow. Depending on how your style works, some words and sentence styles may or may not be appropriate. Knowing what kind of style you want to write provides a structure around which you can build your prose.

Style One: Purple Prose

We’ve all heard of this one. For most of us, we heard it and then shudder.

No one likes purple prose.

Or do they?

Purple prose, in short, is prose that relies heavily on excessive description and hefty word choice. One of the most obvious examples that comes to my mind is The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Other examples such as A Tale of Two Cities, and other classics, could be considered purple prose at times.

You’ll notice that both of those book are famous books, and both are heralded as excellent (at least by many). And both have purple prose.

If we’re reluctant to think of purple prose as a good thing, why do we enjoy books that use it? And why should we, as writers, seriously consider using it as a style for our own books?

Purple Prose: The Cons

Before we get to the positives of purple prose, I want to discuss why we hate purple prose. Many people find The Scarlet Letter boring. My older sister and I have both read it, and she hated it. I thought it was kind of dry, but still well written.

Purple prose is boring to unengaged contemporary readers. Two hundred years ago, purple prose was all that people had to read, and so they enjoyed it. Most of the words used in purple prose are archaic, now. Modern readers prefer quick descriptions that paint a moving image, rather than in-depth descriptions that paint a portrait.

If done wrong, or done too heavy-handed, purple prose pulls the reader out of the story and causes them to disengage. That’s never a good thing.

Purple Prose is enjoyed by a select audience. I’m not saying that only a few people enjoy books with purple prose and that no one from any other demographic will like those books, but there is a niche market for purple prose styles. You’re going to pull in people who love to read for reading, but not really anyone else. Sure, others may still read your book, but it won’t be for the style. It will be for the plot or the characters, the prose will just be a nuisance to those readers.

But for the readers who love to read, your book will be a masterpiece the look back on fondly.

Purple Prose: The Pros

Why should you write using purple prose?

Purple prose allows the author to explore concepts deeply. Can you spend a chapter describing one character? With purple prose, I don’t see why not. Can you open your book with a description of a rose bush and describe it in such a way that literature experts spend decades trying to decide what the symbolism is? With purple prose, I don’t see why not.

Purple prose paints wonderful portraits. Some of my favorite descriptions come from heavy-handed books written in purple prose. With the freedom to describe whatever you want for however you want, you can paint scenes your readers will never forget.

Now, this isn’t to say you can just spend your whole book describing. Plot and characters and theme are still vital to a good book. However, purple prose allows you the freedom to describe things in ways other styles may not allow.

The Book and the Style

One must always consider the target audience and the genre when picking style.

For instance, purple prose is rarely found in books targeted at YA or younger. Almost always is it in adult fiction. In addition, most purple prose is found in historical fiction or contemporary fiction. Does this mean you can never write a fantasy for YA with purple prose? No, it does not. It does mean, however, that you have to be much, much more careful.

Those YA folks don’t take to kindly to an excessive number of words.

Purple prose can be a hard thing to master. Done right, however, it can paint pictures in the reader’s mind that they will not soon forget.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: there will be no blog post next week, since I will be at a writing conference the whole week and won’t have time to write a blog post (funny how that works). The week after, I’ll post about my experience, and then the week after that I’ll resume posting about styles.