How to Balance Dialogue, Description, and Action in Your Book

​I like to think of action, dialogue, and description as the three “macronutrients” of writing. Just like with nutrition, when all three are present, you digest the scene much better. So today I’m going to discuss how to balance dialogue, description, and action in your book to make it more palatable to readers.
 
(If you’d like to view this post in video format, click here. It’s part of our “Advice from an Editor” series on YouTube.)

​I’ve already done individual videos/posts on action, description, and dialogue, and I do encourage you to check those out if you’d like to learn about any of these topics in more detail, and most especially about the balance needed within each of the three. However, for the purposes of this post, I’ll be giving a simplified definition of each, its main use, and how to use it in conjunction with the other two.
 
By “simplified,” I mean, for example: There are cases in which dialogue can be used to give description or to further the action. In those cases, I will be counting them as in the description or in the action category, rather than across categories, to keep things simple. I’ll also primarily be using the beginnings of books as an example, just because, as a publisher, I see the beginnings of a lot of books, and this is a big problem that especially needs to be resolved in the beginnings of books. Which is to say that all three macronutrients need to be present—unlike later in a book, where you can (sometimes) get away with leaving out one of the three.
 
Let’s start out with some easy definitions. First, description. Description is material outside of action or dialogue that gives information to the reader and sets the scene. For example, in the beginning of a film, an establishing shot of the city is description, and then zooming in on the characters at the beginning is further description. The main purpose of description is to give the reader a foundation from which they can better understand what is going on in the dialogue and action.
 
Dialogue is any spoken text or thought text, if it’s an active thought. The purposes of dialogue are to reveal character, to give stakes, and also to help explain to the reader what is going to happen in the action—along with, of course, why you care and who these people are.
 
Finally, action is stuff happening. It doesn’t have to be your classic action scene; it’s simply the plot progressing, and you don’t have a story without it.
 
Let’s go into how each of these shouldn’t be used alone in the beginning of a book, or really anywhere in a book. Let’s start with description. Going back to our filmography example, if the beginning of a book—and by “beginning,” let’s say we mean the first couple thousand words or the first chapter—if that is only description (which is tempting because, after all, description is beautiful), it’s like having our establishing shot, and then zooming in, and then turning the camera somewhere else, and then going and showing the reader something else . . . and it’s basically a slideshow of pictures from your vacation. It gets boring really quickly because there’s nothing happening and there’s no one for it to happen to.
 
On the other hand, some writers start their books with nothing but dialogue, and this is tempting because dialogue is catchy and we need to keep that story going along at a good clip, right? . . . Yes, except that without description, we don’t know who’s talking. Maybe you’ll know their names, but it’s like if you had a film zoomed in on two fuzzy people with nearly identical voices saying things back and forth. And you can’t tell which one is saying what, and it quickly becomes confusing and it’s hard to care because it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on because you have no foundation from which to understand where we are and who these people are.
 
Similarly, writing a beginning that’s just action can be very tempting, because action is fun and fast-paced, and doesn’t everyone want some of that? . . . Yes, but only if we care about the people and know where we are. If you had a film in which the entire first twenty minutes was just indistinct characters you know nothing about reaching off-screen and suddenly doing something with action, it would be ultimately meaningless. We have to know where we are, and we have to be able to care about these people, in order for action to be good and interesting.
 
So just having one of the three doesn’t work. But how do you balance them; how do you progress from one to the other? I’m going to give you a very common example. I’ve mentioned Jonathan Stroud’s The Screaming Staircase in earlier videos because it’s a fabulous book, and that book follows this pattern. My own book Bargaining Power also follows this same pattern. It’s a very common, user-friendly pattern to follow, and it goes like this:
 
We start with our establishing shot. This should be a broader shot—you start with a shot of San Francisco and then you zoom in on the office that your characters are in. This can be a broad statement about the world of the book or about the personal relationships going on, or just general philosophy. Terry Pratchett is fairly well-known for beginning his Discworld series this way.
 
In the case of my book, I begin with a statement along the lines of “No king can stay in power without the support of his lords and the respect of his people.” The Screaming Staircase starts with something like “I’m not going to talk about my earlier cases, because they’re too terrifying and too awful and not really relevant [*in a quieter, faster voice*] and also, we totally screwed them all up.” This tells you so much about the protagonist and so much about the world she inhabits.
 
This initial broad shot can be about 100 to 200 words, and then we move into the closeup, which is another 100 to 200 words. (In general, this initial descriptive section should be between about 50 and 400 words, usually about 250 on average.) So you add a little bit of closeup description: In the case of my book, we go from “king and country” to “I was sitting looking out the window, and there’s this weird limo that keeps driving by.” And in The Screaming Staircase, it’s “Now, this particular case that we were about to take part in—I’m standing next to my coworker—was like this . . .” A little bit of description right on the scene.
 
Once we have the initial dose of setting description, we move into dialogue. Dialogue has an initial stage and a transitionary stage. The initial stage—which should still include description, by the way; it should just add dialogue to it—is going to give the reader their initial feeling for the characters involved, help set up initial stakes, and help give a hint of the action scene to come. (Although, of course, all action scenes have twists, and so it’s not going to go exactly as planned—at least not if it’s well written.) We’re just setting it up a little, discussing it, and continuing to add description.
 
We then move into a bit of a transition. In this dialogue section—2 pages, 500 words, give or take 200 words—we’re going from “We were just talking about what’s going to happen” to “We’re moving into what’s going to happen.” This usually involves some sort of physical movement because it’s transitioning into action. In the case of my book, my character is going from the office to the car that has been stalking them. In The Screaming Staircase, the owner of the haunted house arrives and says, “Uhh, you look a bit young to be paranormal investigators.” And so you have a transition, usually with some more dialogue or some more description or a little more of both, but moving us from one place to the next.
 
And then finally into the action. It can be action through dialogue, or it can be classic action, or it can be a mix. Mine is action through dialogue; it’s just two people sitting there talking, but it’s very tense and more than one life is at stake. Whereas in The Screaming Staircase, they are chatting and they are learning things, but they’re also in a haunted house looking for the source of a haunting and fighting a ghost.
 
So there are variations on a theme, and there can be slight variations on how long each of these takes; it’s just a guideline to say “250 words of description; starting from a distance and moving in; 500 words of dialogue, give or take 200; some transition text, which can be anywhere between 300 and 1,000 words; and then however long your action is.”
 
That’s all for today. Thank you for joining me! Do you have any other advice, comments, or questions about how to balance dialogue, description, and action in a book? Leave them in the comments!
 
For more writing tips, check out our Advice from an Editor YouTube series, or this set of blog posts.

As an Amazon associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Deborah J. Natelson

Deborah lives with a fluffy member of fauna named Flora and two pretty black kitties. She is the author of Bargaining Power, a smart, twisty fantasy thriller; and various other books. Her author website is www.deborahjnatelson.com.