Dialogue Sandwiching Telling

Sandwich: Getting the Best of Dialogue and Narrative Telling 

In this example we see dialogue surrounding. By inserting narrative it speeds up the telling and allows for more accuracy than the character might use. For example, the character says it was just another mission, “nothing special.” But the narration tells us he was terrified of leaving a man behind. 

"We were on-mission, guarding a house. The brother-in-law of some­body's nephew, one of those things. There was a lot of that stuff there. Still is. Anyway, it was just another mission, nothing special."

The squad bulky with body armour under desert gear. The acrid smell of sweat and the way the clinging dust itched. A silent head count, his hun­dredth of the day, terrified, always, of leaving a man behind: Jones, Camp­bell, Kaye, Frieden, Crist, Flumignan, Borcherts, Paoletti, Rosemoor, and Martinez, ten men. His ten men. Martinez clowning, saying that to really guard the house, they ought to be inside, where the owner was watching the Red Wings on his satellite television. Joining in the laughter, feeling good, the air soft with the approach of sunset, already tasting the ice-cold Gatorade that would be waiting in the chow hall.

Then the sound of the engine. The joking vanishing instantly, re­placed by operational paranoia. They'd moved as a team, weapons fixed, positions good, covering the entrance to the courtyard. He'd led from the front, the first to step onto the winding alley that fronted the place.  [Underlining added.]

"It was an ambulance, an old diesel job with black smoke coming out the back," he said. "I heard a loud pop, sounded like a blown tire."

—from page 175 of At the City’s Edge 

More Telling: Blunt and Sakey

In the last post, we say Marcus Sakey start with an action paragraph with a couple of sentences not being in the moment. I checked a couple of openings by Giles Blunt in Forty Words for Sorrow and By the Time You Read This, and they both began with purely descriptive paragraphs, one paragraph for Forty Words and four By the Time. Here's the paragraph from the former:

It gets dark early in Algonquin Bay. Take a drive up Airport Hill at four o'clock on a February afternoon, and when you come back half an hour later the streets of the city will glitter below you in the dark like so many runways. The forty-sixth parallel may not be all that far north; you can be much farther north and still be in the United States, and even London, England, is a few degrees closer to the North Pole. But this is Ontario, Canada, we're talking about, and Algonquin Bay in February is the very definition of winter: Algonquin Bay is snowbound, Algonquin Bay is quiet, Algonquin Bay is very, very cold.

This opening is more traditional, but Sakey's is more attention grabbing with the protagonist having a gun pointed at him. Sakey's telling is sandwiched by ongoing action, while Blunt's is a continuing narrative.

In the following excerpt Blunt uses telling to enhance a subject already raised in the action as Sakey did in his opening paragraph with a beer:

“How long is this expedition of yours?” Cardinal said, but his wife didn’t hear him. They’d been married nearly thirty years, but she still kept him guessing. Sometimes when she was going out to photograph, she would be chatty and excited, telling him every detail of her project until he was cross-eyed with the fine points of focal lengths and f-stops. Other times he wouldn’t know what she was planning until she emerged from her darkroom days or weeks later, clutching her prints like trophies from a personal safari. Tonight she was subdued. [Underlining added by me.]

Done this way, the transition is seamless, as is the exit from the digression by use of the next piece of dialogue: “What time do you think you’ll get back?” In other circumstances the transitions don't have natural entries and exits, and to avoid choppiness and confusion it is necessary to indicate these points. 

In Chapter 21 of Forty Words, Blunt guides the reader in and out of transitions in the following way.

• The chapter begins with Cardinal, the protagonist, enduring the cold in his poorly insulated house. He closes the curtain on the picture window cutting of his view of the Lake.
• Then he says: "Somewhere out there [the lake], across the frozen lake, somewhere in the middle of town perhaps, the killer was going about his normal day."
• While thinking of the killer, Cardinal wonders if he'd taken any photos of his victims, which lead to a transition within the telling digression to a new topic in this manner: "Thinking of cameras made him think of Catherine [his photographer-wife]" 
•  Blunt signals a return to the regular scene in traditional manner: "But now the telephone waited for him [to make a call]."
• The word now is the trigger. Readers know what it means.
• Blunt then uses the telephone to transition to another digression; i.e., why the telephone was waiting.
• He returns to the ongoing action by picking up the telephone and dialing his daughter. 

Sakey in At the City's Edge, page 28, moves in and out of the main scene like this:

• Character glances out the window
• "Clark and Division. A weird-ass place": a description of the place follows
• When the telling is done we are moved back to main action with this:
• "The smell of coffee pulled him from his reverie."
• Any sensory shift will likely work. Consider the following in place of the coffee smell: her touch, her voice, her perfume, the movement of, and the like.

One more from the same book, page 39:

• Character driving with a young boy staring blankly out the car window.
• He asks the boy if he is feeling any better, and the boy's response is tighten his finger on the armrest.
• As reader we wonder what wrong with the boy.
• Next words in the text following armrest: "Twenty minutes ago when Jason had yanked open his apartment door ..." The telling follows.
• "He turned onto Damen, driving through..." And we are back in the car again.