Narrative Summary, Dialogue and Action

The building blocks of a book

If something about your novel feels ‘off’, the pace is dragging or things just feel a bit flat, something that can help is looking at the tools you’re using to tell the story, and making sure the right parts of your novel are conveyed to the reader in the most impactful way. Managing how you tell the story, through balancing dialogue, action and narrative summary, has a huge effect on your pacing, characterisation and emotional impact – and can help make sure your book is satisfying, compelling, and unputdownable.

What they are and how to use them

Dialogue

Dialogue is your chance to develop characters and show your readers how they interact. The way your characters speak – the words they choose, the complexity of your sentences – can tell your readers huge amounts about what that character is like and how they are feeling. And you can show their relationships too: who do they chat with easily, and who do they talk at cross purposes to?

Dialogue is a really great way of developing characters by showing us who they are and how they feel rather than telling us. Speech becoming more staccato and emphatic? Perhaps they’re angry. Precise and formal language? They’re someone driven by logic, not feelings. In dialogue we see who characters are. You can show their personality, their relationships, and their emotions. But you can also drive plot. Your characters might reveal things that move us forward – secrets they’ve been keeping, or clues to follow – or drive another character to act in response to what they’ve heard.

Dialogue can make your pace quick and snappy if your characters fire one-liners at each other with little action or description in between. But a long chunk of dialogue can also be hard to follow, and it’s not a great way of sharing important elements of the plot with readers without it feeling unnatural – we don’t want to have dialogue that narrates the story or tells the reader things that the character wouldn’t naturally say. Adding in some narrative summary and action around the dialogue can help root the reader in the scene.

Action

Action is where you can really add some excitement to your novel, increasing the pace and tension by showing your characters moving from a to b, fighting, embracing, hiding something, finding something… Action helps move the plot on and keep pace high, but it can be exhausting to read endless action scenes back to back, or and we risk things reading like a list of actions rather than a compelling story.

Action is great for moving the plot forward, but it doesn’t allow us to see how the characters feel about what is happening, or why they are acting like this. We need dialogue or narrative to understand why the action matters. A comment I write on pretty much 100% of manuscripts I edit – sometimes multiple times through the book – is ‘Can you dig more into how the character’s feeling here?’. I don’t just want to know what they’re doing; I want to know why that matters.

What is driving the characters to act, and what are the stakes of what they’re doing? This is the whole heart of your novel. Otherwise it’s just a series of things happening, one after the other.

Narrative summary

Narrative summary is description of what’s happening, where we are, how your character is feeling. It allows you to condense events so we can skim over things that the reader needs to know but doesn’t need to see; perhaps a few months pass, some background information is shared, or a character’s long-term feelings or emotions are summarised.

This is a great way of transitioning between scenes or time periods so that it doesn’t feel like we jump from place to place. It gives your reader a breather, slowing things down in between moments of high action – and so making those action-packed moments more impactful too.

How to balance the three