So You Wanna Be a Writer, Huh?

How To : Dialogue

A lot of what I'm writing in this book are just suggestions. They're free for open interpretation and are not clear-cut answers to your questions. This, however, will be one of the moments in this book where I'll be giving actual lessons, instead of just suggestions and advice. For future reference, chapters titled "How To" will discuss steps or tools to get the desired result.

And today, we're going to talk about dialogue.

Dialogue is a very important part of a story. Most stories have them. It's just another tool to further character development and break up those lengthy paragraphs of description.

So without further ado, let's start our first how-to!

When I was just a young writer, I was so eager to write a new chapter that I didn't really think about how it must have looked to my readers. Believe it or not, there is a correct and incorrect way to write dialogue. I didn't realize this until my freshman year in high school, so do not feel discouraged if you didn't already know the following rules. That's what I'm here to teach you.

1. Quotation Marks

This should go without saying, but to indicate that one of your characters is speaking, you should use quotation marks. If you don't know what these are, they are the weird "looking things" around the words looking and things.

You should always use quotations at the beginning and the end of what is being spoken. Otherwise, it can get confusing as to where the speaker stops talking.

Compare...

"I like pineapples," Sandra said.

"I like pineapples Sandra said.

The former example is the correct way to use quotation marks.

2. Dialogue Tags

You may have noticed in my previous example that I made use of "Sandra said" to indicate Sandra said that she liked pineapples. That is a dialogue tag.

Dialogue tags describe how the spoken words are being spoken. In face-to-face interaction, we can always tell if someone's words sound angry or excited. In books, that isn't quite the case, so we need to use the dialogue tags to make it clearer.

For example...

"I hate you!" she exclaimed.

and

"I hate you," she spat.

These two statements are saying the same thing, but they sound differently in our heads. The first one implies she was joking around, the second implies that she was pissed off.

Now you don't need dialogue tags after every single spoken sentence. Sometimes, two characters can have a conversation and depending on the context of the conversation, you don't necessarily need to point out how the words are being said. For example...

"Hey, did you watch the news yesterday?" Bob asked his best friend.

Tom looked up from his magazine. "No."

"Why not?"

"I didn't have time," he replied with a careless shrug.

Notice that I only used dialogue tags twice. "Bob asked" is one, and "he replied" is the other. I didn't use a dialogue tag when Bob asked "Why not" because the question mark implies that it was a question rather than a statement and he didn't ask the question in any snotty or unusual way.

This is where it's up to you to decide when you should and should not use dialogue tags. If it shows something about the way your characters current mood, then by all means, go for it.