Dialogue vs Description: Finding the Balance

It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's a question of how much to. – Stephen King, On Writing

Why are we even having this discussion?

Because it’s hard to get the balance right.

In my personal experience, I find description difficult and dialogue dead easy. Despite being a prolific reader, I also grew up watching a lot of very dialogue-dependent television – see soap operas, anything and everything Russell T Davies and Sally Wainwright have written, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ve internalised these rhythms of dialogue in a way that I just haven’t with written description. Writing character is also one of my strengths and dialogue reveals character. So I have to work hard on description, in every single round of redrafting I do.

When we read the best stories, we don’t notice this delicate dance. We’re consumed in the characters, the plot, the setting. But we’ve all read a book where we start flicking pages because there’s only so long we can read about how the furniture is laid out in the same room and we’ve all cringed at a character sounding like the Steve Buscemi ‘how you doin’, fellow kids?’ meme.

Now, this blog post is about dealing with the quantity, rather than the quality. The five pages of furniture description might actually be compelling in the right hands – Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, for example, has acres of description that I adore even though I’m not really a descriptive person.

Also, the balance is highly dependent on genre. After all, if you’re reading a fast-paced thriller, you don’t necessarily want to know about the rolling hills when you just want some functional language before someone else gets murdered. A piece of literary fiction being really dialogue-heavy, however, would feel jarring. Meanwhile, fantasy and horror tend to have a balance between the two: enough description to set the scene or evoke emotions while still driving on the plot or delving into characters.

Finding a balance

As I explained, this is highly genre-dependent, but just because a book belongs to a certain genre, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about the balance. The drawbacks of too much dialogue include the risk of over-exposition (i.e. characters stating the obvious to each other) and losing any sense of where and when (and why) a scene is, while the disadvantages of overegging the description are veering into purple prose and pacing issues. None of these things necessarily kill a book, but it doesn’t hurt to take a bit of time over how tweaking the balance can potentially transform a story.

Honestly, I have three pieces of advice based on my own experience:

-        read a lot in the genre you’re writing in – what’s the average dialogue:description ratio? How does it affect the books?

-        consider both the point of and the pacing of each particular scene (reverse outlining can help)

-        don’t think about dialogue fighting description, think about them enhancing each other

Dialogue and description in Coldharbour

Here’s one of my favourite scenes, in which I had to work hard to strike the right balance between the dialogue and the description as the character dynamic undergoes a fundamental and very significant shift:

“I really shouldn’t be here,” Elizabeth sighed.

“And yet here you are,” Alex said, shifting closer, “again.”

“Here I am,” Elizabeth sighed, “again.”

“Who are you?” Alex asked, as softly as she dared. “Really? Cos I’ve spent the whole day thinking that I don’t actually know the first thing about you. You can’t slice a block of cheese properly but you can cut a man’s throat open, there’s more in Pandora’s backpack than in your flat, and your twin sister goes round possessing people like she’s Interrailing.”

For all of Elizabeth’s bravado, there were cracks. There always had been with Alex. Yes, she’d been witness to her hauteur when she met Sam, that dark fury directed at Barrett and Eleanor, all of that infinite strength, but thinking about it, now Alex could breathe and think, her rage from last night and her frustration from the afternoon coalescing into something still wounded but calmer, she could pay attention to the twitch of Elizabeth’s fingers, the tremor of her jaw, the shallow inhales and barely audible exhales.

Where Elizabeth’s hair was still rain-damp, the colour of fading embers at the ends, all Swan Vesta at the roots, it didn’t quite cover her scarred cheek when she, as usual, had let it deliberately fall forward, and Alex watched the lip getting sucked in between Elizabeth’s sharpest teeth, because if it was stuck there, it couldn’t tremble. It couldn’t say anything else stupid. It couldn’t do what Alex had wanted all weekend and had barely had a taste of last night.

“I’m really not that interesting,” Elizabeth told the floor.

Her face was the white of wilting ashes, her throat a precarious, pulsing pink as livid and as vivid as Power.

Alex begged to differ.

“The truth isn’t always very nice,” Elizabeth said.

“I don’t care.”

But then Elizabeth looked up at her with red-rimmed eyes and whispered a weak “sorry”.

“You ain’t brushing me off with sorry,” Alex said. “You came back, didn’t you? Didn’t have to, did you?”

“I’d never forgive myself,” Elizabeth said, “if something happened to you.”

“Really?” Alex scoffed.

“You can’t see me, can you?” Elizabeth said, baring her fangs like it was somehow Alex’s fault. “You’re looking right at me and you can’t see me anymore.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”