Guest Author - Melissa Weise

At some point in your story, someone is probably going to speak. In fact, dialogue in a story is one of the biggest draws for a reader. It makes your characters more accessible and allows the reader insight into your characters in a way that pure exposition could never do. It also breaks up the space on the page which is really good. Nothing is more of a turn-off to a reader than big long paragraphs with no breaks or empty space. Dialogue therefore is much more than just your characters talking. It provides a break for the readers’ eyes and access to the readers’ emotions.

Unfortunately, dialogue can be difficult for some writers to write. This can be for several reasons. First, there is the often misunderstood punctuation. Then, there is that tricky word “said” which can be cumbersome and repetitious. But both of these basic problems have straightforward solutions that, once mastered, can make your dialogue can shine with the best.

Dialogue punctuation is a series of paragraph indentions, quotation marks, and commas that must be mastered. It helps to think of it this way: each time your character says something you need to start a new paragraph. And when you write the word “said” it remains in the sentence of the dialogue itself. For example:

“Gift horse,” Octavious mumbled.
“I don’t care about your stupid gift horse, Tavious,” William said.

The first sentence that the first character says is finished with a comma and a quotation mark with the words “Octavious mumbled” being the actual end of the sentence. Then, another paragraph is started for the second character to talk.

And you characters don’t have to just talk, they can do things while they talk, too. Just like real people. It just takes a few more commas and sentence finangling. For instance, the dialogue above could read:

“Gift horse,” Octavious mumbled.
“I don’t care about your stupid gift horse, Tavious,” William said, standing, “I don’t think it is right. I want a real punishment.”

This allows William to stand and continue talking within the confines of the dialogue sentence.

You can also have the action happen before the dialogue which would read something like this:

“Gift horse,” Octavious mumbled.
William stood. “I don’t care about your damn gift horse, Tavious,” William said, “I don’t think it is right. I want a real punishment.”

If you follow these simple punctuation rules, your dialogue will look clean and correct.

So what about the word “said”. There is some discussion about it, actually. Some people hate having a series of several “he said” “he said”s running down a page. For instance:

“I won’t lie to you,” he said.
“I didn’t ask you to,” she said.
“I was hired to kill you,” he said.
“So I heard,” she said.
“But now I don’t know if I can,” he said.

See? The repetition of the “saids” distracts the reader from the tension of the scene and can end up sounding ridiculous. There are several ways around this, though. The first is to switch up the words which can end up looking like this:

“I won’t lie to you,” he muttered.
“I didn’t ask you to,” she answered.
“I was hired to kill you,” he said.
“So I heard,” she whispered.
“But now I don’t know if I can,” he whined.

This, too can get annoying, though. In fact, changing up the way characters say something can be incredibly distracting. It is better to use these types of words sparingly and eliminate the word said entirely (this can only be done if there are two characters and it is obvious who is talking):

“I won’t lie to you,” he said.
“I didn’t ask you to,” she said.
“I was hired to kill you.”
“So I heard.”
“But now I don’t know if I can,” he said.

This actually makes the writing go along at a nice clip. Just notice that when the words “he said” and “she said” are eliminated, the sentence needs to end inside the quotation marks with a period.

It may take some practice, but after a while these concepts of dialogue writing will come easily and that is where the real fun begins!