Prose checks › Dialogue and narrative Pro
Prose check: dialogue and narrativeTalk, or tell?
Some scenes are all talk. Some have nobody speaking for pages. Falcontext measures how much of your text is dialogue and how much narrative, so you can see the balance.
In Falcontext’s Edit tab, Dialogue and narrative is one part of Dialogue balance, with monologues. Each part has its own light, and the worst sets the check’s.
What the dialogue and narrative check measures
The share of your words inside quotation marks, against the rest. On a scene, a chapter or the whole book.
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“Just out, Mara. Does it matter?”
He shrugged.
What’s normal?
In the middle book of the 38 I measured, about a quarter of the text was dialogue. Genres differ a lot, which is why the green band is wide.
Where these numbers come from.
How Falcontext checks dialogue and narrative
Guidelines, not rules. Talky or quiet, both are books. This shows you which yours is.
- Finds
- The share of words in quoted dialogue, against narration.
- Traffic light
- 10–70% dialogue
- 3–85%
- Outside that
No light without quoted dialogue: a scene where nobody talks, or a book that sets its dialogue with dashes.
See it per chapter too, in Bird’s Eye’s averages and outliers (Pro).
The balance of talk and telling is something to look at scene by scene, in the second pass of how to self-edit a novel.
Are you a dialogue writer or a description writer?
Questions about dialogue and narrative.
How much dialogue should a novel have?
There’s no set amount, and genres differ. In published fiction about a quarter of the text is dialogue in the middle book. Falcontext stays green anywhere from 10% to 70%.
Does it work with dialogue set with dashes?
Not yet: it counts dialogue in quotation marks. A book that sets speech with dashes gets no light here.
Related checks
In Falcontext
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