Overheard a guy at the coffee shop say his fantasy novel has zero dialogue, and now I'm wondering if I overuse talking heads.

It was just a throwaway line about a 200 page manuscript where nobody speaks, but it made me realize my own WIP has like 10 pages of back-and-forth in the first chapter alone, has anyone else tried stripping out dialogue to see if it changes the pacing?

2 comments

2 Comments

jesse_cooper25d ago

I tried this on chapter 3 of my own manuscript last year. 12 pages of dialogue just gone, replaced with action and internal monologue. The pacing did speed up a LOT, but something felt hollow without that back and forth. I ended up landing at about 60 percent of my original dialogue, just cutting the fat where characters were basically saying the same thing twice. Maybe try it on one chapter as an experiment, you can always paste the old version back in if it doesn't work.

wood.john25d ago

Wait, are we all just standing around in coffee shops eavesdropping on other writers' problems instead of fixing our own? I tried a no-dialogue scene once and my character spent three paragraphs describing a sandwich, which is about as exciting as listening to me explain why I keep rewriting the same sentence seven times. My rule now is if two characters are saying the same thing twice, I just let them awkwardly stare at each other for a page and call it "atmospheric tension.