Narrative or Dialogue based story?

[bronwyn1]

As I edited my novel, I noticed that a lot of the voice of the novel really comes out in the dialogue, rather than in the narrations and the descriptions (there's some voice, but the non-dialogue parts aren't as "voice-y" (haha is that a word?) as the dialogue parts).

Is that a problem? Or is that just a different style or writing/etc? What are your novels like? Are they dialogue based or narrative based?

[polymath]

If it were my manuscript to evaluate or if I was tasked to evaluate it, I'd think perhaps the narrative voice either connects with or disconnects from the dialogue voice. I might suspect the differing levels of voice could be invoking an aesthetic hunch arising from the subconscious saying that something is unsettled or inconsistent or might be something asking to be brought more forward.

I'm not comfortable with an unsettled narrative voice, one that can't seem to decide when best to show action and when to tell detail to an audience, or decide who the narrative is addressed to, if anyone. When a narrator comes across as a real or implied author directly addressing me as a real or implied reader as if from a lectern on a stage and me sitting in an audience, I'm uncomfortable, except when I'm really there to hear a celebrity for the sake of being there in person or as close to it as circumstances allow.

Some questions for illustration purposes I'd ask of a narrative voice;
If the narrator is an overt one, does she/he/it have a subjective attitude toward the topical theme? Condeming? Sarcastic? Judgemental? Approving? Supportive? Amused? Intimidated? Awed? Fearful? Worried? Delighted? And so on.

If the narrator is a covert one, does she/he/it intrude on or complement a viewpoint character's voice? In Free Indirect Discourse, a covert narrator is subsumed by a viewpoint character's persona, essentially taking over the narration in a freewheeling transference from a narrator to a third-person substitute for a first-person viewpoint character. The value of which is a more likeable-believably unbiased reporting than a first-person account might be.

Another question I'd ask is who is being addressed by the narrative? Who's addressed is a subtle aspect of a narrative voice, perhaps more subtle than attitude, tone, tenor, mood, and register are. The Homeric Cycle, the Illiad and the Odyssey, is in a direct address voice to a real audience, as befits their original oral narrative traditions and purposes.

One Thousand and One Nights, known in the West as Arabian Nights, has a frame story narrated by Scheherazade directly addressed to her husband Shahryar within the framework of the larger story. The subsequent story installments narrated between intercession scenes are her addressing the stories to him. It's a direct address to a character in the story, but indirect address to audiences from the very insignificant remove of an observer invisibly present within the story. The narrator directly addresses a narratee. Audiences engage indirectly with the direct address yet intimately with Scheherazade's insuperable dilemma.

Much of contemporary literature doesn't address anyone directly. Most of it indirectly addresses a narratee. A fair portion of the rarer and better expression of address has a reflexive nature, almost as if a viewpoint character's running interior discourse addressed to the self as it unfolds consciously is the entire narrative. I'm especially fond of the latter.

[Nick]

I am very much a dialogue man. This WIP less so, but my characters do a lot of talking, and I like to use dialogue to reveal plot details instead of block text, whenever plausible (not very often). That said, I'd say my voice is fairly consistent throughout, insofar as the characters each have their own voice because let's face it, everybody talks differently. There's some uniformity, because obviously you don't want it to be jarring, but I'm not going to make every character use the same voice as the narrative just for sake of consistency.

[bronwyn1]

If the narrator is a covert one, does she/he/it intrude on or complement a viewpoint character's voice? In Free Indirect Discourse, a covert narrator is subsumed by a viewpoint character's persona, essentially taking over the narration in a freewheeling transference from a narrator to a third-person substitute for a first-person viewpoint character. The value of which is a more likeable-believably unbiased reporting than a first-person account might be.

I think this describes my current completed novel that I'm querying. It's YA and people say all the time that YA needs to have a "voice," but I find out that most, if not all of the "voice" comes through via the dialogue of the characters, especially the main characters and that the narration doesn't really intrude on the voice, but is notably from one specific character's perspective and point of view (though a few times the main point of view changes and the narration gets a pretty significant voice), but overall, voice for me comes from the dialogue.

[polymath]

I'm kind of thinking that the meaning of voice intended is the standout attitude, standing, tone, tenor, mood, and register of the viewpoint character's conversations. Which is the ideal for Free Indirect Discourse narratives.

In that case, yeah, I can see how the narrative voice not standing out as pronounced might seem to have little to no voice. I do, however, suspect the narrative voice is doing its job subtlely and not intruding on the viewpoint character's perspective.

Narrative voice as I know it incorporates a gamut of structural and aesthetic attributes: grammatical person and number, tense, psychic access and motility, attitude, standing, tone, tenor, mood, register, address, and narrative distance. Viewpoint character voice ranges the same gamut, sometimes in installments alternating with a narrator or secondary characters' perspectives. Just in FID, a viewpoint character's voice, or characters' in multiple viewpoint narratives, entirely takes over for a narrator's voice.

[Nathan Bransford]

A dialogue-centric novel is really difficult to pull off. There are definitely writers who are able to do it (Elmore Leonard comes to mind), but for the most part it's difficult to avoid them feeling like transcribed screenplays. The dialogue has to be really, really good, and feel very natural. For most mortals it's important to ground the novel in description and action in order to keep the reader engaged in the story.

[daringnovelist]

I wrote screenplays for a while (and read them as a first reader), and I found that when I first came back to fiction, I did find it a challenge to flesh out my writing - but eventually I got back into the swing of it and my fiction voice returned.

What got me back was realizing that I could (and must) do the part of the actors and write in the performances and pauses and tone and especially effect. I'd look at the dialog as an outline for the scene, and after that, came the real writing.

Camille