He Said, She Said: Writing Effective Dialogue: Beyond the Style Manual, #3

By Laura E. Koons

Dialogue that drones on, clutters the page, or stalls the scene can ruin even the best of novels. Learn to avoid common dialogue pitfalls, balance your writing, and dazzle your readers, editors, and agents with snappy scenes and smooth-as-silk transitions between dialogue and narrative. He Said, She Said is packed with innovative instruction, detailed information, and essential exercises to help your dialogue skills mesmerize and impress.
The information offered in He Said, She Said is easy to understand and simple to implement. In this guide book you will learn:
- How to balance realistic dialogue with your narrative style, including addressing accents and learning the 4 things to leave out of your dialogue
- 5 ways to seamlessly insert dialogue into your scene, such as expressing gestures and employing summary dialogue
- 7 tricks to getting the most out of dialogue tags: everything from finding the right intensity level to avoiding POV issues
- 4 ways to improve your dialogue crafting skills, with prompts and exercises included
Don’t waste an opportunity for success by settling for mediocre dialogue in your novel. Let He Said, She Said help you craft your characters’ exchanges with ease and skill.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
• Release date: Nov 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502286949

Book preview

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Beyond the Style Manual™

He Said, She Said: Writing Effective Dialogue

A Red Adept Publishing Book

Copyright © 2014. All rights reserved.

First E-book Edition: November 2014

Red Adept Publishing, LLC

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Garner, NC 27529

http://RedAdeptPublishing.com/

Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Beyond the Style Manual Series

Hook, Tagline, and Sinker: Writing Irresistible Book Descriptions (Beyond the Style Manual 1)

Get to the Point: Trimming Unnecessary Words (Beyond the Style Manual Book 2)

He Said, She Said: Writing Effective Dialogue (Beyond the Style Manual Book 3)

If you are looking for a publisher, find us at Red Adept Publishing or Cinnabar Silk.

If you are a self-publisher looking for an editor, find us at Red Adept Editing.

Introduction

Of all the elements of writing, dialogue can be one of the trickiest to get just right. It can also be one of the least forgiving if you get it wrong. Writing fiction is always an exercise in balancing a sense of realism with the artistic conventions of telling a story through words on a page, and dialogue, because it purports to represent what people really sound like, can test a writer’s ability to perform that balancing act.

Unlike some aspects of writing, dialogue has few hard and fast rules. Once you’ve mastered the conventions of the punctuation used to represent dialogue on the page, the rules for writing dialogue become more like suggestions. But some of those suggestions will serve you well in trying to write dialogue that will sound like real people while still reading like good writing. For every suggestion outlined in this manual, you will be able to find at least one lauded writer who is famous for a style that ignores or even flouts that suggestion. But if you’re aiming for good, realistic, readable dialogue that breathes life into your story, following the guidelines in this manual will set you on your way.

This manual will lay out those guidelines, helping you get your dialogue on the page, teaching you how to integrate your dialogue into your narrative, and giving you tips on how to strike that important balance between realism and style in your dialogue. Finally, the last chapter provides exercises for you to practice your dialogue, along with discussions of those exercises.

1:

Putting Dialogue on the Page

How Dialogue Should Look on the Page

One of the keys to writing effective dialogue is ensuring that your dialogue appears on the page in a way that is easy to read and will let your reader know that it is dialogue without drawing undue attention to itself. While this section will not go into the particulars of all the various little tricks of punctuation that can arise in writing dialogue, it is important to understand a few basics regarding how dialogue is traditionally presented.

The presentation of dialogue on the page has varied over time—and still does vary from country to country—but in U.S. publishing, dialogue is typically indicated by double quotation marks ( ), with the opening quotation mark () appearing at the beginning of a line of dialogue and the closing quotation mark () appearing at the end.

A dialogue tag may be used to identify which character spoke the line. The dialogue tag must consist of at least a noun (indicating the speaker of the dialogue) and a verb (indicating the action denoting speech). The dialogue tag is separated from the dialogue with a comma. A line of dialogue followed by a dialogue tag looks like this:

Nothing suits me better than a fried egg on toast early in the morning, Billy said.

The tag can also appear before the dialogue, in which case the comma moves with it, like so:

Billy said, Nothing suits me better than a fried egg on toast early in the morning.

In addition to being set off with quotation marks, dialogue is often indicated through paragraphing. In a dialogue exchange, begin a new paragraph each time a different character speaks:

Billy and John walked into the kitchen.

Nothing suits me better than a fried egg on toast early in the morning, Billy said.

Not me, John said. I can’t stand anything but a cup of coffee until at least twelve o’clock.

Actions taken by a character just before, just after, or during his dialogue should appear in the same paragraph as his dialogue. Actions taken by other characters in the scene should appear in a new paragraph (along with their dialogue, if they have any):

Billy and John walked into the