Ah the joys of the second draft. During yesterday’s writing sessions, I discovered that Chapter 4 was 20 pages long and 5,000 words. A lot of it was dialogue.

Yeah, that’s not going to work in a pulp novel…

The good news: I still need a few chapters, so dividing this in two will help out. A lot.

The other good news: I now get to employ a lovely writing trick that most of us (especially myself) should use more often.

Writing trick #37: Weave dialogue into scenes where they characters are actually doing something important to the story.

Words are precious, and word count limits are important if not mandatory. Why have your characters sit in a coffee shop and talk about something when they could talk about the same thing while investigating a problem and moving the plot along? Double dipping is a perfectly acceptable behavior in writing.

Now I have to go back in and structure the dialogue around needed action in two chapters. At least I know what I will be doing tonight. 🙂

How about you? Have you ever spiced up a dialogue scene by weaving it in with action?