I'm banging away on the keys tonight and I suddenly ran into an issue with dialogue. Here's the situation I'm faced with. Let me run an example then I'll pose my question. Example He reached down and picked the map, drawing his finger down the blue interstate line to the small circle that marked the town: Seljar. "This is the place." he said. "This where they took him and....." His hand was shaking now, the map folded under his tightening of his grip. Okay that is the example, it is not an actual piece, but something off the top of my head, but a story I am working on has a structure similar to this. So my question is: Can you drop dialogue into the middle of a paragraph like this if the actions relate to the dialogue. Thoughts?
Yes, as long as the preceding and following action and the embedded dialogue are closely bound, and the actions are those of the person speaking the dialogue. However, I would still be inclined to put a paragraph break after Seljar. Why? because it gives more power to the dialogue, gives it greater prominance in the paragraph.
First, thanks for answering my question. Second, normally I would do that, but with the flow of the story I want to avoid adding unnecessary paragraph breaks. The flow of dialogue in the case of my story involves an exchange between a man and his friend. Thus, both of their exchanges are already separted by paragraph breaks. With descriptive context added to the dialogue I want to avoid ending up with what might look like a bunch bullets running down a page. That is why I really wanted to know if you could wrap dialogue in a paragraph like that. Thanks Cogito
i second all cog had to say on the subject... burying dialog in the middle of narrative is not usually a good idea and will generally annoy readers more than having the dialog separated, which is what we're used to seeing/reading...
