“Wait,” she said, catching his arm. “You can’t just leave it here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you think it would be helpful if we had some good examples to examine too?”
He squinted suspiciously at her. “Probably. Where are you going with this?”
Her only reply this time was a slow grin. He wasn’t sure if he trusted that.
She set the scene quickly, ushering them to a white wicker lawn table and some chairs. As he took a seat, he blinked and glanced down at his clothes. A brown suit. And she was dressed something like a stereotypical 1950’s housewife. Before, they’d been default templates. Nothing more than a stand-in for the reader to wince at. Now, they were almost feeling like proper characters — and he wondered if that defeated the point of this.
She glanced up at his narration. “There is a point to the elaboration. Trust me! If we’re going to give advice on how much action is too much action, then it might do us some good to examine what the is purpose of action surrounding dialogue. Maybe that will help you clarify why the above example felt so bad.”
“And what to do instead?”
“Precisely.”
“Like what we’re doing now?”
“Don’t call attention to it, just let it happen.” She picked up a glass of apple juice and took a sip. “Now, then. Why use action?”
He wracked his brain a moment, then shrugged. “To use less dialogue tags?”
“That is one way to use it. But why the tags?”
“Dialogue tags let readers know who is talking.”
“We haven’t used tags for several sentences. Do readers still know who is talking here?”
“Ideally, they would,” he said. “This conversation only has two people, so it’s either you talking, or it’s me. That’s pretty easy for most people to follow along with for a few lines.”
“Exactly. And the bad example above still used dialogue tags alongside the action. So, the author of the bad example — the hypothetical amateur who writes like that, not the actual author making a point — must have been using the action for something else.”
“Do you think it was to convey tone?” he asked.
“That’s one possibility. Maybe the author had a very specific image in mind, and overelaborated in an effort to press that onto the reader.”
“But it was too many actions and adjectives all at once, all in the same sentence. It made the tone go all over the place.”
She smiled down at her glass, and swirled it gently in her hands. The ice clinked. “A reader has a limited focus. One sentence at a time, one detail after another. Restricting details to the most relevant helps them focus on what’s important.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Then is the apple juice important?”
“Symbollically? The author has his own ideas. Pragmatically? It’s a fixed object we can interact with. If the reader’s mind wanders, and they wonder what we’re doing while we’re talking, they can remember ‘oh, apple juice,’ and imagine us at the table again.”
“So, objects help?”
“Sometimes,” she admitted.
They stared at the apple juice a moment. Shrugging, he took a glass for himself.
“Another problem with being too action-heavy is that it strips away paragraph variety,” she continued. “Action can give the reader a pause to gather their thoughts and absorb the conversation.”
“But it doesn’t do that very well if the pause is distracting, or off-topic.”
“Nope.”
He blinked as realization hit him. “Moderating action is all about pacing.”
“Bingo.”
She sipped her drink again, seeming satisfied with his answer.
“Alright then. I’m glad that’s settled,” he said, settling back into his chair at the same time. Now that they had the crux of the conversation out of the way, they could afford to spend a little narration on goofing off. “What tone do you imagine we’re giving off right now? Contemplative?”
“Cordial, I hope.”
“I can manage that, I suppose. You’re less air-headed in this version of the text. It’s a little easier not to snark at you now.”
She flicked an ice cube at him, ending the scene on mutual grins.
