Speaker 1: I like to think of action, dialogue, and description as the three macronutrients of writing. Just like with nutrition, when all three are present, you digest the scene much better. I've already done individual videos on action, description, and dialogue, and I do encourage you to check those out if you'd like to learn about any of these topics in more detail, and most especially about the balance needed within each of the three. However, for the purposes of this video, I will be giving a simplified definition of each, its main use, and how to use it in conjunction with the other two. By simplified, I mean, for example, there are cases in which dialogue can be used to give description or to further the action. In those cases, I will be counting them as in the description or in the action category rather than across categories, just to keep things simple. I'll also primarily be using the beginnings of books as an example, just because as a publisher I see the beginnings of a lot of books, and this is a big problem that especially needs to be resolved in the beginnings of books, which is to say that all three macronutrients need to be present, unlike later in a book where you can sometimes get away with leaving out one of the three. So let's start out with some easy definitions. First, description. Description is material outside of action or dialogue that gives information to the reader and sets the scene. For example, at the beginning of a film, an establishing shot of the city is description, and then zooming in on the characters at the beginning is further description. The main purpose of description is to give the reader a foundation from which they can better understand what is going on in the dialogue and action. Dialogue is any spoken text or thought text, if it's an active thought. The purposes of dialogue are to reveal characterization, to give stakes, and also to help explain to the reader what is going to happen in the action, along with of course why you care and who these people are. Finally, action is stuff happening. It doesn't have to be your classic action scene, it's simply the plot progressing, and I mean you don't have a story without it. So, let's go into how each of these shouldn't be used alone in the beginnings of a book, or really anywhere in a book. Let's start with description. Going back to our filmography example, if the beginning of a book, and by beginning let's say the first couple thousand words of the first chapter, if that is only description, which is tempting because after all description is beautiful, it's like having our establishing shot, and then zooming in, and then turning the camera somewhere else, and then going and showing the reader something else, and it's basically a slideshow of pictures from your vacation, it gets boring really quickly because there's nothing happening and there's no one for it to happen to. On the other hand, some writers start their books with nothing but description, and this is tempting because description is catchy and we need to keep that story going on and a good clip, right? Yes, except that without description we don't know who's talking. So you'll have, maybe you'll know their names, but it's like if you had a film zoomed in on two fuzzy people with nearly identical voices saying things back and forth, and you can't tell which one is saying which and it very quickly becomes confusing and it's hard to care because it's hard to keep track of what's going on because you have no foundation from which to understand where we are, who these people are. Similarly, a beginning that's just action, it can be very tempting because after all action is fun and fast paced and doesn't everyone want some of that. Yes, but only if we care about the people and know who we are. If you had a film that was the entire first 20 minutes, it's just indistinct characters you know nothing about reaching off screen and suddenly doing something with action, it would be ultimately meaningless. We have to know where we are and we have to be able to care about these people in order for action to be good and interesting. So just having one doesn't work. So how do you balance them? How do you progress from one to the other? Well, I'm going to give you a very common example. I've mentioned Jonathan Stroud's The Screaming Staircase earlier in an earlier video because it's a fabulous book and that book follows this pattern and also my own book Bargaining Power, obvious plug, available on Amazon, that also follows this same pattern. It's a very common, very user-friendly pattern to follow and it goes like this. We start with our establishing shot and this should be a broader shot. You start with a shot of San Francisco and then you zoom in on the office that you're in. So this can be a broad statement about the world or about the personal relationships going on or just general philosophy. Terry Pratchett is actually fairly well known for beginning his Discworld series this way. So in the case of my book, I begin with a statement along the lines of, no king can stay in power without the support of his lords and the respect of his people. Jonathan Stroud in The Screaming Staircase starts it with something along the lines of, I'm not going to talk about my early cases because they're too terrifying and too awful and not really relevant and also we totally screwed them all up. Which tells you so much about the protagonist and so much about just the world in which she inhabits. This initial broad shot can be, you know, one to two hundred words. And then we move in to the close-up which is another one to two hundred words. In general, this initial description section should be between about fifty and four hundred words but usually about two hundred fifty on average. So you have a little bit of close-up description. In the case of my book, we go from king and country to I was sitting looking out the window and there's this weird limo that keeps driving by. And in the case of The Screaming Staircase, it's now this particular case that we're about to take part in, that I'm standing next to my co-worker, is like this. A little bit of description right on the scene. When we've had the initial dose of setting description, we move in to dialogue. And dialogue, it has an initial stage and then a transitionary stage. So the initial stage, which shouldn't still include description by the way, it should just add dialogue, is going to give the reader their initial feeling for the characters involved. Helps set up initial stakes, help give a hint of the action scene to come, although of course all action scenes have twists and so it's not going to go exactly as planned, at least not if it's well written. We're just setting it up a little bit, discussing it, and continuing to add description. We then move into a little bit of a transition. So this dialogue section, two pages of 500 words, give or take 200 words. We have a little bit of a transition where we're going from we're just talking about what's going to happen to we're moving into what's going to happen. And this usually involves some sort of physical movement because it's transitioning into action. So in the case of my book, my character is going from the office to the car that has been stalking them. In the screaming staircase, the owner of the haunted house arrives and is like, uh, well You look a little bit young to be paranormal investigators or ghost hunter killers. Just read the book, it's really good. And so you have a transition, usually with some more dialogue or some more description or a little bit more of both, but just moving us from one place to the next. And then finally into the action, which it can be action through dialogue or it can be classic action and it can be a mix of all three. Mine is action through dialogue. It's just two people sitting there, but it's very tense and more than one life is at stake. Whereas in the screaming staircase, they are chatting and they are learning things, but they're also literally in a haunted house looking for a source of a haunting and fighting a ghost. So there are variations on a theme and there can be, there can be slight variations on how long each of these takes. It's just a guideline to say 250 words of description starting from a distance and moving in 500 words of dialogue, give or take 200, some transition text, which can be anywhere between 300 and a thousand words and then however long your action is. Well thank you so much for joining me today. If you learned anything or found this interesting, please do like this video, subscribe and ring the bell for notifications. Until next time.