Hi everyone. To be honest, I am having my first true attempt at writing a story at the moment. However, I am having issues with how I write my dialogue. It always seems to be very "he said" "She said" and I'm not exactly sure where I should be breaking up the dialogue from the previous paragraph etc. Is there any advice online for writing dialogue between characters? Example of what I am writing is below: Any help would be appreciated. Glad to be a part of this community
When it comes to attributions, give enough to keep the speaker's identity clear, but not so much that the attributions intrude. It helps if you have well-limned characters; ideally, a reader can identify your characters simply by speech after some familiarization with them. I would also be careful about bundling too many other actions with an attribution. A plain "he said" is often fine. And adding a simple declarative statement into the dialogue can help you control the rhythm of the passage. As technical niggle, when closing a quote in preparation to attribution, the punctuation goes inside the quotes. Welcome to the forum.
If the he said/she said bothers you, why use it at all? “Isn’t that the company which helped me get rid of my Epilepsy Mum?” “It is. You should still not get too close to the screen love, come sit next to me before you have a fit”. He did not yield her request, rather he continued watching the news unfold. “What happened?” Tom groped around the room for a place to sit. “Who knows? Let’s get some light first.” She lit a candle. “So, what the hell was that? I could have sworn I heard screaming in the background”. A bead of sweat swelled on her forehead. “I am sure it was just the TV equipment going weird with the power going out."
there's no problem here re separation of paragraphs... you would simply need a line break there, due to the time change, so all you do is place a single # in the center of the line between the two paragraphs... that said, you do have some problems in the writing itself: hope this helps...
Wow thank you both for your help. I really appreciate it. Kind of wish I posted more of my excerpt, but this gives me a good idea what I need to fix anyway. Thank you!
You've gotten some good answers already. With dialogue in general, I find I enjoy reading it the most when written in such a way that attributions aren't needed too often. And don't feel compelled to add description between every piece of dialogue, as it breaks it up a little too much.
“Isn’t that the company which helped me get rid of my epilepsy, Mum?” is in dialogue, and some people would say "which" (evidently!), so I reckon that one could stand.
