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Dialogue: the bare essentials
Cool note: this is my 300th published post on this blog!
There’s so much to be said about dialogue. (Oh, wow—totally unintentional pun!) Some of us do it well naturally—we have an “eye” for dialogue. (And it drives us CAH-RAZY to see bad dialogue in published books.) But we all have different strengths—and we all have things to work on and learn.
The barest basics of dialogue are the simple mechanics, in no particular order. (Because, hey, we all have to start somewhere!)
- Make it clear who’s speaking.
- As a corollary for #1, change paragraphs when changing speakers. (Not necessarily every time someone begins speaking—see #4.)
- Use actual speech attributions (verbs like “said”) sparingly, and default to the near-invisible said and/or asked as often as possible.*
- Use action beats to help identify the speaker (among other important purposes). Keep those action beats in the same paragraph as the speaker, and if you involve more than one character in the thoughts or beats, make sure it’s clear who’s speaking.
- Do not use action beats as speech attributions. Or, as Annette Lyon put it in a guest post here, “Stop smiling words.”
- Punctuate thusly (American style): “I can’t do this,” she said. [comma, followed by a lower-case letter for the speech attribution]
“But you have to.” He rubbed his hands together. [Always a period there! Always a capital next! This is an action, not a way to speak.]
“Really?” she asked. [question mark, lower case for the attribution]
He nodded. “Really, truly, Johnny Lion.” [Again, use a period for the action.]
“But—” [Em dash, no comma or period—but if this was a question, you would put the question mark in. Just to make it hard on you.]
“No buts. I know—” he glanced around furtively—“you wish you weren’t here.” [Although this one may vary depending on the house style.]
*This is actually one I don’t particularly follow. A couple weeks ago, I read something I wrote ten years ago, and I found almost no speech attributions. In fact, I only used speech attributions if the way someone spoke was important—and couldn’t be conveyed through the dialogue (i.e. whispering, sarcasm, etc.). But I’ve also taken that too far, and sometimes it’s hard for my readers to tell who’s speaking. So I’m slowly learning to slip in those little invisible saids without twitching. Too much.
Tomorrow: what goes between the quotes!
Is dialogue one of your strengths? If so, share your best technique, trick or advice—in a guest post!
Photos by Leo Reynolds
Posted in Mechanics, Technique
Tagged Dialogue, punctuation, said, speech, speech attributions
3 Comments
Comparing notes on paragraphing
There is at least one hard-and-fast (mostly) rule for paragraphing in fiction: when you change speakers, change paragraphs. But from there, things can get a little complicated.
If you have a character react to another character’s dialogue without speaking, does that get a separate paragraph? What if the first character continues speaking? Or, to use an example, how would you paragraph this (we’ll call it Exhibit A), assuming it’s the same person doing all the talking:
“That’s the stupidest blog post idea I’ve ever heard.” He scowled at his sister. She rolled her eyes heavenward and sighed, as if begging for the patience to endure him. He took her by the shoulders. “You’re only thinking like this because you’re editing.”
I don’t know that one way is better than another—it mostly depends on what you want to emphasize, and making sure your meaning’s clear. Interestingly, I’ve read a couple books published in the 1950s and ’60s lately, and there seems to have been a rule that every time someone starts speaking, you need a new paragraph, so this example might be:
“That’s the stupidest blog post idea I’ve ever heard.” He scowled at his sister. She rolled her eyes heavenward and sighed, as if begging for the patience to endure him. He took her by the shoulders.
“You’re only thinking like this because you’re editing.”
Which I find confusing, since I think the paragraph change is setting up a speaker change, and it’s not. (
And that might be precisely why they’ve shied away from that.)
Along those same lines, I made sure to include (in this totally-made-up-not-for-real example) a sentence that brought the speaker back into actor position before the second part of his dialogue to try to make it clearer who was speaking. (This may or may not be successful. We would assume it’s him because we haven’t changed paragraphs in the first example, but if the sister’s action was the last sentence before the second part of the dialogue, it might be hard to parse who’s supposed to be speaking. While we may want to “challenge” our readers, we probably don’t want to challenge them just to understand what’s happening 
.)
And then there’s narrating internal monologue. How do you think you’d do this in Exhibit B?
Terrence looked up as soon as he heard the hollow clack of high heels in the vestibule. Andrea came tripping in to the chapel, casting her eyes about hopefully. Terrence read people for a living. The way she leaned forward, her eyebrows drawn up inquisitively: she was eager to see him. And she only knew him as a lie. He suppressed a sigh.
How about Exhibit C?
Angelica nearly missed the meeting. Why she’d spent so long fussing over her hair was beyond her. No amount of fussing had ever made it behave particularly well—and she shouldn’t be so concerned about how she looked. She was lucky to reach her seat before the presentation began. But she was glad of the fussing as soon as they began the introductions—and she knew Mr. Griggs was there. She hadn’t seen him yet, but she could almost feel his presence. Or maybe his eyes on her.
How would you add paragraph breaks to these examples (if at all)?
Photo by kami68k
The art of paragraphing
Part of the reason why paragraphing is so tough is that there aren’t as many rules governing it—but then, that leaves it open for us to play with paragraphs to great effect. Paragraphing can affect meaning and pace. It’s a powerful tool that I, for one, want to learn to wield better.
One way I’ve found I try to use paragraphs to better effect is to write a paragraph of a character reasoning something out, then break to give the conclusion:
Maria shook her head. Jimmy couldn’t have stolen the diamonds. It wasn’t possible. But the passer-by was talking to the policeman, so they were both innocent. The heiress was in the kitchen, flirting with the maitre d’. And Constantina was returning a book to the public library.
That only left Jimmy.
Note that we still organize paragraphs around the same topic. Here, this set of paragraphs are all about Maria ferreting out the suspect in the case of the missing diamonds. The first paragraph, especially, is organized 
around a central theme. It could even have a topic sentence: “Maria sorted through the possible suspects.”
And like in nonfiction, there’s a logical progression and coherence among the paragraphs. Here Maria (rather quickly) goes through an actual logical theorem of sorts, persuading herself from the emotional denial (“Jimmy can’t have done this”) to what she knows must be true (oh, but he did).
In reality, I’d break up that first paragraph between “It wasn’t possible.” and “But the passer-by . . .” Which is the exact kind of thing that made me want to write this post: why do we paragraph the way we do? I think in this example, I want to change paragraphs because she’s almost “changing sides” in her mental argument: “A is true” versus “But A cannot be true.”
I could see an argument for breaking there and then joining “That only left Jimmy” to that paragraph, too. It seems to come down to how dramatic we want that conclusion to be. (And I have a sneaking fear I’m an overdramatic paragrapher!)
What do you think? How does art play into paragraphing? How does “art” play in to your paragraphing?
Photo by Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com
The science of paragraphing
How’s that for nitty gritty?
Usually in school, when we learn what a paragraph is, it has a fairly standard definition: three to five sentences, the first being a topic sentence and/or thesis, and the others relating to that topic. The last sentence should usually offer some sort of segue into the topic of the next sentence to show the logical structure of the overall essay. (In the first paragraph, the last sentence is the thesis of your work.) And that’s a great structure—for non-fiction.
In fiction, paragraphs are still important, but unfortunately they’re not quite as easily defined. We aren’t simply relating information or crafting a persuasive argument—we’re trying to make a cohesive narrative come to life.
There is at least one hard-and-fast (mostly) rule for paragraphing in fiction: when you change speakers, change paragraphs. Beyond that, we’re left with . . . more like “guidelines.”
One of those extremely important guidelines is clarity—break paragraphs to make your meaning clear. Breaking a paragraph between speakers is one reason why we do this. We might also break a paragraph to better illustrate the relationship between the character’s actions: showing cause and effect, for example.
Also, breaking a paragraph can help keep POV clear. I thought it was rather clear whose POV we were in in one scene that I wrote, so the POV character could comment on other characters’ dialogue in the same paragraph as the speech. My CPs found paragraphs like the made-up one in bold below confusing POV:
Lisa leaned back in her seat, trying not to look like she was eavesdropping. They were talking about her—again.
“Well, we were going to tell her.” Oh, really? Like when?
As we read, we need white space to help our minds psychologically space out information. We can use this to great artistic effect (as we’ll talk about tomorrow!).
What do you think? How do you paragraph? How would you paragraph this example?
Photo by Xosé Castro Roig
The virtue of repetition
Is it just me, or does it seem like we’ve been trained never to repeat a word—resort to a thesaurus before you dare to use the word “mob” three times on a page (because “criminal organization” has that same punch, doesn’t it?). It’s like we’ve been programmed to excise all uses of the same word from our writing (thesaurus = well worn!) and, frankly, sometimes repetition is rhythmic and even lyrical. Parallelism—beginning multiple sentences the same way? Anathema!
Or, more likely, anaphora. Sentence- or phrase-initial repetition is an age-old rhetorical device:
Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition! — Shakespeare, King John, II, i
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right… — Abraham Lincoln
[W]e shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. — Winston Churchill
And that’s just one type of rhetorical repetition. I applaud repetition for a good purpose—cadence, humor, contrast. Lather, rinse, repeat!
Dwight V. Swain (Techniques of the Selling Writer, 33) points out the best way to make sure that your repetition is understood as intentional—the Rule of Three. Use something twice and it looks accidental, but go for the third time “and after, if you don’t carry it to absurdity,” Swain adds), and we have to assume you meant it.
Granted, we must also be careful we don’t overuse words and phrases. (Churchill’s full paragraph from that speech contains 11 “we shalls,” including 7 “we shall fights.” Was that overdoing it? Probably not—especially since that was delivered orally. Written out, it might feel a little less impressive and a little more redundant.) There are definitely times when we inadvertently repeat words. Crit partners (and Find & Replace—I’m loving Word 2007′s Reading highlight) are great for catching those.
When you repeat a word, do it on purpose. If there’s no better word for that situation, see if you can repeat that word for some effect—rhythm, sonority, humor.
What do you think? How do you repeat words—and make it clear you’re repeating those words on purpose?
Photo by Eric Tastad
Posted in Mechanics
Tagged anaphora, dwight swain, repetition, rhetoric, rhetorical device
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Who’s laughing now?
Well, after all that tension, I thought we could all use some stress relief, eh? Every once in a while, after all, you do have to let it out.
The other day I was reading a blog post that mentioned making someone laugh. “Not just guffawing, but outright laughing,” they clarified (okay, that’s not what they said, but that’s basically the idea). But that note left me scratching my head: isn’t guffawing harder than laughing?
So today I bring you a game! From two thesasauruses (those are dinosaurs that know a lot of words), I gathered all the synonyms for laughter:
| amusement be in stitches break up burst cachinnate cackle chortle chuckle convulsed crack up crow die laughing fit fracture gesture giggle glee grin guffaw heehaw |
hilarity howl merriment mirth peal rejoicing roar roll in the aisles scream shout shriek snicker snigger snort sound split one’s sides titter wakka wakka wakka whoop yuck |
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In the comments, let’s rank these from the most hilarity/hardest laughter to lightest. (And feel free to leave out ones you don’t know. “Cachinnate”?!) Note that this list includes both nouns and verbs.
Photo by Jackson Carson
What’s your favorite “macro” editing technique?
There are probably as many ways to edit a story as there are to write one. Today, I’m thinking about “macro” edits—looking at structure and scene placement, rather than the individual words and style.
One of my favorites has been the scene chart, inspired by a post on Edittorrent. The original post suggested creating index cards for each scene, listing a 
number of important features—everything from where and when the scene is set, to first and last lines, to “promises” made to the reader, to important details like descriptions. Then you could move the index cards around to resequence events or scenes, or play with the story without hurting your MS.
Like many of the commentators on the post, however, I used a spreadsheet to do this in a very small space. I also combined this with probably the most important thing I learned from Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure—the structure of a scene and the importance of a scene goal—for the character, not just me as a writer.
When I used these techniques together, I found that the scenes that lacked a goal for the character (or a unique goal, as opposed to one that the character’s had four times now) were often the unfocused scenes I needed the most work on—or to cut altogether. I could also bring out hidden scene goals, find new ones to add layers to a scene and strengthen the scenes by enhancing the goals, conflict and disasters.
So here’s an example of the kind of scene chart I used, partially filled in for an imaginary story (anybody recognize the plot? Hint: it’s from an old card game). I didn’t use all of these columns myself (and if any of them aren’t clear, feel free to ask what I mean).
That’s just one thing I’ve tried, and I liked it so well, I’ll definitely use it in the future.
What do you think? Do you use a form of scene charts? What’s your favorite “macro” editing technique?
Photo credit: Aaron Brown
Posted in Mechanics, Technique
Tagged editing, editing techniques, jack bickham, revision, scene and structure, scene charts, scene goal, scene goals
7 Comments
The myth of the serial comma
The Oxford comma, or serial comma, is a standard convention in many publishing houses—but almost no newspapers. The serial comma is the final comma before the conjunction in a list:
Angela bought eggs, milk, and butter.
Some serial comma enthusiasts say that serial commas are required, and that the recent tendency away from serial commas is yet another sign of the deteriorating state of English literacy, blah blah blah. But the most common argument in favor of the serial comma is that it just takes care of so much ambiguity, such as in this famous example:
I’d like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
And yes, it’s true that if this person had used the serial comma, it would be clear that they didn’t use “Ayn Rand and God” to mean “my parents” (hello, apposition!). But let’s be honest—you knew what this person meant, didn’t you?
It’s just simply not the case that the serial comma always clears up ambiguity. How many people are in this list?
I’d like to thank my father, the man who saw me through so many hard times, and my mother.
Is “the man who saw me through so many hard times” the same person as “my father”? (That sneaky appositive again!)
And then there are even times when the serial comma can’t fix the ambiguity:
I’d like to thank Angela, my editor and my wife.
So is Angela his editor, his editor and his wife, or neither?
What to do:
Use the serial comma—or don’t—as you’re used to (or according to your publisher’s style guide). Add it or remove it if there’s any ambiguity. And if that doesn’t work, reword. (I’d like to thank my wife, Angela, who edits my work.) Just don’t claim that one way is always right—because it’s not.
Do you use the serial comma?
Photos by Xavi Blanch and Leo Reynolds
Posted in Mechanics
Tagged comma, commas, grammar, oxford comma, punctuation, serial comma
2 Comments
