My relationship with balancing dialogue and description is like my relationship with balancing cardio and strength training. I love doing cardio. Ice and thunderstorms are the only weather elements that keep me from power walking or running outdoors. However, I find strength training boring, and on any given day I can give you tons of excuses not to do it even in the warmth of my own home. Still, I feel off when I neglect to incorporate it into my workout routine. My body needs it.
The same is true of description in my body of work. Just like cardio, I love writing dialogue. I even correctly predict the next words of characters on TV shows and movies, to the disdain of people watching the broadcast with me. However, descriptive passages in narratives bore me. Still, I often feel that my scenes are off because I don’t include enough description. Am I right or wrong and how can I rectify the problem without boring myself in the process? To find the answers to these questions, I decided to do the same thing I do when trying to create a balanced exercise plan. I consulted the experts, the novels that I like to read.
My favorite novels are page turners. They include lots of dialogue, but I figured that there had to be descriptions that worked to move the narrative forward, without boring me. After taking the time to analyze a few passages in each of them, I saw a common technique. I found out that it isn’t so much just description that I’m missing. It’s character psychology. In the novels I analyzed, authors used character psychology to create drama. When they did describe a room or another setting, they did so through the narrator’s eyes. What’s more, descriptions of physical environments were used to tell readers where they were. Then the dialogue began. Sometimes readers had to be reminded where they were and the author threw in a dash of description.
In the end, I learned that good descriptions support my dialogue making it richer and stronger just as my strength training supports my cardio. Thinking of it this way makes writing descriptions and lifting weights much more enjoyable.