G is for garrulous characters

I'll bet you didn't think I'd figure a way to do my Writing Wednesday post and keep it in with the A to Z challenge, did you?  *giggles*  Well, you're right for this week.  Next week I PROMISE I'll get my WW post in properly.  I suppose we can count my "E" post as my Writing Wednesday post, right?  *sighs and moves on*

Garrulous characters.  I think we've all run into those.  Those are the characters that want to talk about anything and everything.  They're the ones who deliver the backstory in rambling dialogues between them and another character - who is most likely your MC.  They speak in huge chunks of text and can often take up entire pages and even chapters with their rambling dialogue.

How do we cope with these characters?  When I'm reading a book and I come across those types of characters, I tend to skim it and move on.  If the information is vital to a later part of the book, I go back and reread it.  If I have one of those in my own writing - and believe me, I end up with them a lot - I go back and either edit out the conversations or shorten them considerably.  Or I deliver the information in a different way.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have chatty characters in our stories.  Dialogue is one of the better ways of moving stories forward.  It can't all be exposition and description.  You need to have conversations in there somewhere.  We just have to be careful how much information we're spewing onto a page from any one given character.

Garrulous characters can be important to the story, but we have to remember to rein them in so they don't get out of control.  Do you ever find yourself with characters delivering massive speeches or long, rambling monologues just to get a point across?  How do you deal with them?