: How do readers/writers alike feel about too much narration in a story? My question is pretty much summed up in the title. My story includes a lot of narration. Narrating events, narrating character's

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I like good narration and am annoyed by too much pointless dialog.

Actually, the dialog does not even need to be pointless. I become annoyed by dialog.

So, as a reader, to answer your question, there is no such thing as "too much narration." But there is, to this reader, such a thing as "too much dialog."

In my critique groups, I see some writers relying super - heavily on dialog. This is presumably because it is in some ways easier to write. (It is also harder to write well, in other ways.)

I believe many find it straightforward to type out a conversation, whereas describing an imaginary scene/setting requires, well, imagination and language. So, I have seen some writers relying heavily on dialog, and what ends up happening is the conversation is not well - anchored within a setting, and also the nuances of the conversation (the shading of words or stances of the people or contextual thoughts or subtext) are lost. I think some writers feel that the 'quick pacing' that they achieve from a crisp dialog and the 'all important white space' that one sees touted, are the goal.

The goal is a good story! Not speed and white space.

Edit:

I had actually read statistics on this ratio for fantasy books some months ago.

Density: One way in which these books differ significantly from one another is in the proportion of narration to dialogue. The texts of the majority of titles are less than 50% dialogue, ranging from a low, narrative-heavy score of 13% dialogue for The Wizard of Earthsea, to a much chattier 37% dialogue in The Final Empire (Mistborn #1 ). But the real odd-balls are Santiago, which is 59% dialogue, and The Last Unicorn, which scores a whopping 63% talky-talk. These two outliers seem so at odds with the rest of the group that I had to go into the text and examine it myself, to be sure that there wasn’t some kind of bug in my analysis tool, but my visual inspection did reveal an awful lot of dialogue in these two books.

creativityhacker.ca/2013/07/05/analyzing-dialogue-lengths-in-fantasy-fiction/
Second Edit:
Are you actually asking about whether it is OK to have info-dumps? because that is a separate question but some conflate it with narration.

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I don't think this balance matters terribly much.

The more critical measure is whether there is tension due to conflict. If your narration is describing a battle, for example, it can go on for pages without any dialogue. If your narration is describing people at high risk (trying to infiltrate a lair, for example) it can go on for pages.

It is tension that keeps readers turning pages to find out what happens on the next page. The tension is usually caused by conflict, but can also be caused by novelty. Like a character seeing something for the first time, that the reader also finds captivating. A giant alien space station or something. A living dinosaur.

It is easier to create tension in dialogue than in narration, just because the speakers can disagree, misunderstand, get confused or angry or resistant.

Thus a story that is mostly narration is more difficult for the writer to keep interesting, and you risk people getting bored or fatigued by the amount of information they are given without anything happening in the story with the characters. But if you can craft your narrations to engage people's imagination and give them a simulated imaginary "experience" then your story can be fine.

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