: Re: Is it a bad idea to have all the action in the beginning and all the dialogue in the end? I wrote a short story. All the action happens mainly at the beginning of the story. You can see

@Carla500

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One thing I would say its that in an extended dialogue scene a lot of the he said/she said ends up being redundant and similarly fragments of narrative can get in the way. Once you've set the scene and got the flow of the conversation going it is often better to just let the dialog flow without too much interjection.

Equally while the is clearly supposed to be a bit of a stilted conversation it is a sequence of very short sentences and you might find it flows better if you roll some of the narrative description into the dialogue and edit each bit of speech into longer chunks.

In this case I think you could cut a lot of the 3rd person narrative without losing anything once you have established that this is a conversation between two people you shouldn't need to specify who is speaking every single sentence.

In isolation it's certainly not bad in itself but if you have a lot of dialogue like this it can get a bit clunky and hard to read.

It also sounds like this scene needs a longer monologue, after all you go from an initial awkward meeting to having talked all night in about 2 minutes of written dialogue. Maybe have a paragraph of narrative explaining what they talked about and as the scene developed start to have one or both characters talk in full paragraphs.

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