After reading a lot of the newer books, and the introductory parts of books on Amazon, I'm worried. Not so much that my story is in a real life setting, but that I have gone over board with the dialog. I'm at 51k words with about 70% dialog. Is that too much? I did read that the narrative uses more words to get the same point across. As a short story writer I have always been on a word reduction program. I'll never get 80k words in for my novel. Whats a guy to do?
Maybe? 70% would seem to be on the high side, but there's nothing wrong with going heavy if you write really good dialogue. It'll have to do a lot of heavy lifting to make the narrative work. I would think the more you lean on it the more subtle it would have to be. Too clever or too snappy and it might burn out after a few chapters. I'm not even sure what 70% would look like. Probably plenty of books have done it well, but I can't seem to think of them off the top of my head.
I think that this is very heavily It Depends. It might be totally fine; it might not be. Do you have anything in the Review Room that would let people opinionate?
IDK. We don't have anything to work with as the Lordess of Logic has made mention. Though I have read one or two that were dialogue driven, but they carried their plots poorly (Not that I am saying yours is following suit). So without reference material to look at, how can anyone really say? Hmm? Though if I can say one thing, my work is not carried by the dialogue, but in the thoughts and actions of the characters more so.
I think I might have panicked a little, ok a lot. I counted the dialog for the first thirty pages and the last thirty it is closer to 35% I just felt engulfed in dialog trying to expand the narrative to get the word count up. So as Roseanne Roseannadanna would say, "Never mind."
Opinions incoming: I love dialogue. I skip paragraphs, entire pages, to continue with dialogue. Dialogue tells me more about characters than pages of upon pages of action and description. I want to see characters talking, feel the emotions they're feeling for each other. All non-dialogue should exist to set up more dialogue. Character interactions are the backbone of a story. You can never have too much interaction. 70% is a fantastic amount of dialogue to have. As a side note, I really like dialogue.
I'm feeling better about it now that I went back and reviewed the dialog. My editor likes a lot of dialog, and has encouraged more, but this is the first 'third person' novel so I'm still learning. Thanks to all for the replies.
