When is the prose too much description for you?

[DAgent]

I'm one of those people who likes to have a good idea of what the location looks like in a story, especially a new location or a character we're seeing for the first time, and when writing I tend to try to paint a picture of what a place or person looks like.
I know some people don't like that at all, and prefer a faster overall pace with more emphasis on dialogue, and as much as I like to paint a picture, I also like to try to get the best balance I can between the prose and dialogue.

So what I'm wondering is how people prefer to see a balance of prose and dialogue.

Would a full page of prose with no dialogue at all out you off?

Would a page that's half prose, half dialogue work best for you?

Would more of a mix work better to keep you interested? ie, 3 lines of prose in one paragraph before a line or two of dialogue before going back to a paragraph of prose and repeating like that some time?

What would work best for you if the prose is specifically trying to get inside the characters head to show their thoughts?

 

[ckatt]

Maybe you should look at it the other way. When is the prose too little description for you? Try for less and see what you get.

Would a full page of prose with no dialogue at all out you off?

Not as a rule but it could. What would be more important is if something at the start hooked me and if the following description felt like it was informing the question raised by the hook. Check out the first page of Ann Lekie's Ancillary Justice. It begins with this sentence: "The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it." Immediately, I have questions about the body and there is a hint of setting, the snow. ( You can see the rest here on Orbit's page ) She does a great job of pulling me in before the first line of dialogue arrives.

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

I don't think it is about quotas. It should be about what is important. Describe things that need to be described; things that are important to the story, the characters or the world-building!

If I have two people darting into a broom cupboard for a quick rendezvous, it doesn't really matter what the broom cupboard is like. It may be useful to say if it is dark, or cramped, or smelly; that definitely helps the reader's understanding of what is going on (what the experience is like for the characters involved). But there is no real reason to describe the brooms and buckets in detail. In fact, it may be better to let the reader imagine the cupboard for themselves as much as possible (it will seem more real to them that way). It is a common error for the writer to over-describe unimportant detail, just because they think the reader should visualize the scene exactly the same way they do. Or just because they feel good writing is highly descriptive. Good writing can certainly be descriptive, but it is usually efficient (everything being included for a good reason).

 

[Biskit]

I don't think there's any simple formula like that. What matters is that the writing draws me in as a reader, and keeps on pulling. The example from @ckatt really emphasises that point - a bit of information, a bit of suspense, some scene-setting, and overall a hook that says the next sentence is worth reading to find out what's going on.

I'm one of those people who likes to have a good idea of what the location looks like in a story, especially a new location or a character we're seeing for the first time, and when writing I tend to try to paint a picture of what a place or person looks like.

What do you mean by having a "good idea" of the location? I would probably get bored if you spent a page telling me about the character or location, unless what you were telling me was interesting. If that description is fine detail about appearance, then it had better be something spectacularly intriguing, and probably ought to be significant in the story. When I'm writing, I would tend to avoid more than two paragraphs in a row telling the reader about a scene or character, unless there were some entertaining bit of backstory or the like to lighten the impact. In general I'm not much into detailed description of people and places, and where I do put it in, I prefer it to be a part of the story.

I've just taken a quick look at what I did for the start of my first book, Hell of a Deal, and there's about two pages A5 before the first piece of dialogue. Now, that's probably misleading, because it's written 1st person, and the narrator is "talking" direct to the reader, so the distinction between prose and dialogue gets a bit blurred.

Breaking down what I did...
Para 1 - one sentence. "Everyone has their demons, but I buy mine wholesale."
Hopefully, that gets the reader's attention.
Para 2 - a couple of sentences introducing the narrator, with a snarky joke in the last sentence.
Para 3 - some cheery background on the narrator shop, the staff, how things work
Para 4 - a couple of sentences about the neighbourhood
Para 5-9 - explains a bit about the business, the family hardware store turning into a place where tourists and wannabes can buy occult tat, with the serious demonic brokerage in the background.
(That's about 600 words so far)
para 1-14 - Dialogue!!!! Meet the narrator's annoying, arrogant and careless demon-trading best mate from school, destined to be a pain in the proverbial throughout the book, and continuing in that role for the rest of the series.

That's it - about 850 words. Scene break. Next up is the start of bad things happening.

When I looked at my space opera, Streamrider, the first dialog is about 1.3k words in. However, breaking down the opening para or two has a similar pattern...
Para 1 - "Lois stepped into the slipstream for the first time in her life, running from a bad day, a bad relationship and a thug with a knife." Hopefully, that catches the reader's attention...

OK, there's another two sentences, but it's very much stepping straight into the action, whilst dropping hints about the character... (I hope). The dialogue 1.3k words later are when the "initial panic" is all over and the story quietens down for a while.

Once I've done with the Lois character, the next chunk of the chapter tells the story of the "thug with a knife", relatively light on the dialogue, quite busy with description and background, but all woven into an action sequence. I think it's quite fast-paced, without a lot of dialogue.

Overall, the first half of the first chapter, just under 5k words, provides an introduction to a pair of characters and a world, and in a sense it is an infodump, but spread across two scenes, both done as action sequences. How well it works is another matter, but the aim was a balance of action, description, world-building, story and establishing something about the conflict between the two characters.

Once I start poking at it, I can see that I've taken a different approach with the two books in terms of when dialogue appears, but in both cases I've tried to intersperse description with activity.
(If it's any help, all of the above is within the samples on Amazon.)

 

[The Big Peat]

There's a very interesting article on "Invisible Writing" - What Do People Really Mean by "Invisible Prose"? - that touches on this. I was coming here to post a thread on it, but since this is here...

In any case, the answer, personal to me, is

It depends hugely on just how it's done but I generally like my prose simple so I can zoom from plot point to plot point at a hundred miles per hour. Which suggests a lean towards dialogue, which does go quicker.

There's a lot of fantasy books that are in love with their landscapes, that makes them characters and produces those long wells with prose. I struggled immensely with Titus Groan. I am not in love with it in Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, or Gideon the Ninth, but could appreciate them all. I loved the beginning of Nicola Griffith's Spear, The Tombs of Atuan, and Rosemary Sutcliff.

That's a heavyweight list. In terms of objective quality, it's difficult to pick much between them. Just some of them hit for me and some don't. I can't quite pinpoint why. It's not even familiarity, because the deserts and darkness of Atuan are alien to me, and Sutcliff and Griffith talk about the English countryside much the same as Tolkien or Richard Adams. It's just sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I can't see a magic formula here.

I would also add that I love inner monologues. To me, the ability to do that is why we're telling a story in a book rather than a movie or comic to begin with.

 

[tinkerdan]

The balance is dictated by what is going on in the scene.
I have entire chapters with no dialogue and others with very sparse dialogue.
Then there are the dialogue heavy chapters. (some of those can end up being the "as you know..." type of infodump.

 

[Swank]

Individual sentences can get so weighed down with unrelated description that the reader is starting to lose the subject of that sentence by the time they finish:

Scratching on the roof top of HIll House, one of the last original farm structures in Caliope, the rooster prepared the first crow of the day - the one that would inevitably wake Mr. Polity, local dowager and sport medicine consultant.

 

[Wayne Mack]

There may be two separate questions here. One, what is the minimum amount of description necessary? Two, how to make description interesting to read?

Personally, I am very comfortable with white room scenarios. Tell me that someone is on a busy street or in a forest and I am satisfied. I do not require any additional description. My only peeve is to avoid late addition of details. For example, if the PoV is going to leap over a table, be sure to let me know that is a table in front of him or her, let me know it is there well before the PoV has to jump across it.

I am not sure what my upper limit for reading description might be, but my criteria is that it needs to maintain my interest. The description should not disrupt the story. Some thoughts on how do this:

Maintain PoV. Do not jump into an omniscient perspective to describe a setting. Avoid using the 'zoom in' technique. For me, switching PoV like this puts the description outside of the main flow of the story and signals that it is not really that important.

Describe the scene using a specific character trait (borrowed from Brandon Sanderson's lectures). Give each PoV an interest that may not be necessary for the plot line, but would color how the PoV views and describes his or her surroundings. An architect or an artist might focus on specific details of the surrounding buildings. A historian might tie in past events that occurred in the location. A spy might focus escapre routes or locations for covert meetings. Use the environment description to also reinforce the PoV character.

Avoid just using precise, detailed descriptions, but use the description to present the intended mood. Should it be a happy, boisterous setting? Should it be dark and somber? Should it be humble or pretentious? Don't simply describe what things look like, but describe how the reader should feel at this point in the story.

I'm afraid that this is not a direct answer to the question, but I hope it might spark some ideas regarding the underlying concerns.

 

[sknox]

Dialog is not inherently faster or more interesting than description or other narrative. In the right hand, it can be plodding and dull. Also, the writer who writes bad description doesn't magically write good dialog.

I also suggest that we as readers change over time. What was once dull might seem engaging years later. Our tastes, even our process of reading, changes with age. All we really can say is how this particular book struck us at this particular moment.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I strongly agree with everything sknox says in the post just above.

Dialogue is not automatically engaging. It can be so "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable" that reading it becomes a chore. In fact, I had abandoned books after the first page or two because the dialogue was so badly-written that continuing any further promised to be intolerable.

As for description, it depends on the author and their style. It can be so bland and lifeless that even if it only consists of a couple of words here and there, it can feel like too much. On the other hand, some authors write description that is so vivid and engaging, I don't know if it could ever be too much for me.

 

[sknox]

I do think there's a goal for every aspect of story telling; namely, clarity. A description must describe enough to make the scene understandable. Dialog must make the conversation coherent to the reader if not always to the characters. Same goes for narrative, which is often neglected in these discussions.

 

[The Big Peat]

Gotta say, I agree there's no shortage of bad or ungripping dialogue out there, but I've never met descriptive prose I can fly through in the same way I can fly through dialogue.

And while I know this an impatient, subjective response... but bad, or indifferent, or sometimes even merely good description turns me against a book than bad or indifferent dialogue.

 

[Steve Harrison]

It's extremely important to get the balance between description and dialogue exactly right.

(Hoping someone can tell me how to do this)

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Gotta say, I agree there's no shortage of bad or ungripping dialogue out there, but I've never met descriptive prose I can fly through in the same way I can fly through dialogue.

But what is the rush? I mean, I can be a fairly impatient reader myself, when it comes to wanting to know what happens next, or to have any mysteries and questions answered, but getting the whole experience over with as soon as possible doesn't seem like much of a goal.

but bad, or indifferent, or sometimes even merely good description turns me against a book than bad or indifferent dialogue.

But dialogue is where so much of the characterization is revealed. If it is bad, or boring, or unbelievable, then so are the characters. And if the characters bore me or irritate me or otherwise fail to engage me ... it's over for me and that particular book. Bad description can at least be skipped over without missing the plot. But skip or rush through the dialogue? That way lies confusion, since I might miss whatever it is important for me to know about the characters and events. Besides, if the characters are not interesting, why would I wish to spend any time with them in the first place?

 

[The Big Peat]

But what is the rush? I mean, I can be a fairly impatient reader myself, when it comes to wanting to know what happens next, or to have any mysteries and questions answered, but getting the whole experience over with as soon as possible doesn't seem like much of a goal.

Because for me reading quickly is the way to have my best reading experiences.

It means getting all those twists and jaw-dropping moments and pithy phases one after the other, just bombarding my brain with all that good stuff. To me its like jamming all the great moments into a short period is like putting a ton of my favourite flavours into a meal. I like it intense.

It also means giving my brain less time to get bored and distracted, which is pretty much vital for me.

Now, yeah, I can have some great reading experiences reading slower... but it's not my preferred method. And while I'll put up with it from a 5/5 book, I'm just going to DNF 3/5 books that don't let me read fast.

But dialogue is where so much of the characterization is revealed. If it is bad, or boring, or unbelievable, then so are the characters. And if the characters bore me or irritate me or otherwise fail to engage me ... it's over for me and that particular book. Bad description can at least be skipped over without missing the plot. But skip or rush through the dialogue? That way lies confusion, since I might miss whatever it is important for me to know about the characters and events. Besides, if the characters are not interesting, why would I wish to spend any time with them in the first place?

Each to their own. I get why that plays out for you but for me

a) I probably get the majority of who a character is from actions and internal monologue rather than dialogue, so it doesn't bug me the same
b) I can pick out the plot relevant bits from dialogue whilst reading quickly a lot easier than I can from description, and I find a lot of books where the description is regularly plot relevant and/or the author is sprinkling description all over the place so I can't really skip it
c) Description I don't like reads slower and as I've said, reading quick is key, particularly for merely okay books
d) I'm perfectly happy reading a book with bland, archetypal characters and intriguing plots/worlds anyway. I'm also quite used to books with gripping action and hammy dialogue.



Which all goes to show just how difficult it is to create some magical formula that will appeal to everyone, as everyone wants different things and gets different things from the same page.

I guess I'd add to that as an answer to OP's question, you're probably best off looking at the popular books you like, working out what the balance looks like there, and replicate that and aim for the same audience. Which is what most of us are doing subconsciously anyway.

 

[paranoid marvin]

I'm not sure I'd like to have description-dialogue-description-dialogue, I think I'd rather have it interspersed. Tolkien was very good at this, and at getting characters to describe areas in their dialogue.

 

[Wayne Mack]

I'm not sure I'd like to have description-dialogue-description-dialogue, I think I'd rather have it interspersed. Tolkien was very good at this, and at getting characters to describe areas in their dialogue.

For what it's worth, one of the things I picked up from Brandon Sanderson's lectures is that a reader will be in either dialog mode or description mode. When the reader is in dialog mode, the reader will not really pay attention to the descriptive bits and instead will be skipping ahead to the next line of dialog. I find that I agree with this and dislike it when characters are fidgeting when they are talking. I also find that lines of dialog embedded in a description feel superfluous and can usually be omitted entirely without affecting the flow or understanding of the text.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

About the third word in…

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I think it is fortunate that there are so many different authors writing their stories in so many different ways, since it is obvious from the responses here that not all readers share the same tastes ... and sknox is right that a reader's tastes can change over time. Mine certainly have, or at least I am able to experience and appreciate (or not appreciate!) things in wholly different ways than I did forty or fifty years ago, which I suppose is hardly surprising.

So rather than ask the question of such a small sampling of readers, I think that The Big Peat is right when he says you should consult your own preferences and see how the authors you like do it, then do something similar. I've always said that the best way forward is to write a book that you would have loved to read ... if somebody else had written it. Trying to please an audience that doesn't include yourself, well, it would make writing a chore and it can make the writing itself look stiff and unnatural.

 

[msstice]

So what I'm wondering is how people prefer to see a balance of prose and dialogue.

I think I would read a book that was just dialog and I would read a book that had no dialog with equal interest if the writing was good. I think the same rules apply to both: an ideal passage advances character, plot and world (backdrop) regardless whether it is dialog or not. When it doesn't the story stalls.