I'm not sure if I need to put this dialogue on a new paragraph or if it can stay on the same line as the description of the person about to speak: Brenlin swallowed the little pride that she still had and reached a hand towards the man. “My shoe is stuck.” Thanks
Yeah, you're okay but it's probably not something you want to do often within the same passage/page of dialogue. If overdone, it might seem as if the narrator is superseding the dialogue by constantly framing what the characters are about to say through an extra bit of explanation. Almost as if they need help to be understood. It's not the biggest deal in the world, but the human noodle is trained to filter thoughts through paragraph breaks, so if you're always starting one with description, it might feel as if the character is not completely present in what they are doing.
It's perfectly all right. A. John ran his hand nervously through his hair. "I have never really thought about it." B. John ran his hand nervously through his hair. "I have never really thought about it." The first one makes it clear that John spoke at the same time or immediately after he ran his fingers through his hair. The second one feels like there was a short pause between running his fingers through his hair and speaking. Sometimes, a line break can even confuse the reader as to who is speaking. "Mike, you better learn your place and stop making trouble." Mike still looked defiant. "If I leaked that photo to the press, you would be ruined." Here the reader can easily end up unsure about who spoke the last line.
I do this when I want to show that the character does something before they speak. It seems unnecessary to separate the dialogue from the action since she speaks.
Okay, so let me offer the biggest piece of writing advice you are likely to ever get. The answer is, put that all in the same paragraph. Now, you might say, "In what way is this the most powerful piece of advice about writing in my entire life?" There is a law, set mostly in stone, that you paragraph when there is a change of subject, person, place, time, something significant. Readers expect that a paragraph marks something meaningful. During dialogue, meaningful means PERSONHOOD. You probably know that if someone else speaks, you break to paragraph. Not every writer knows this, but certainly most do, and it is one of the first things we learn about dialogue. Paragraphs in dialogue mean NEW PERSON. But wait, why would anyone imagine that something is different between thoughts, actions and dialogue. If it is the same actor, it belongs in the same space. PERIOD. If it is a new actor, thinking, acting, speaking, it belongs in another space. PERIOD. Now, imagine this dialogue: Tamas kicked himself for getting involved, but anyway shouted, “They’re with me. Rather loosely, as you may notice.” The guard gave the women one last look then smacked their table, making them jump. He shouted across to Tamas, “I’ve not made your acquaintance, either.” “For a fact.” The guard stood with his ale and wandered over to sit at the chair opposite Tamas. “You’ve a look about you, as well.” Tamas laughed. “All my life folks have told me that. I hail from Othur, though, as you might tell by my manner of speech.” The guard leaned in, putting both elbows on the table. “Your speech is not so different.” “Othur is not so far. Hundred miles, south by southeast, as the buzzards may choose to fly.” The man leaned back, now putting a hand to the flintlock at his side. Maintaining eye contact with the man felt like a good idea. That way he’d not miss the flinch. Now, first shove the table into his gut then be sure to blow both barrels and reload before anybody blinks. “These women—” “Our uncle died. Pa sent me to fetch them to our home before they came to no-good account. They ain’t too keen on it.” “And yet they sit clear over there.” Why does this work? Same actor/same paragraph. New actor/new paragraph. The actor is the glue, not exclusively the dialogue. ACTOR. So, when one man speaks in a paragraph, we often know this because he also acted there or thought there. When we break to paragraph, the reader is trained to assume it is NEW ACTOR. Think not. Let me try it your 2nd suggested way: Tamas kicked himself for getting involved, but anyway shouted, “They’re with me. Rather loosely, as you may notice.” The guard gave the women one last look then smacked their table, making them jump. He shouted across to Tamas, “I’ve not made your acquaintance, either.” (the HE, here, is the guard, but the reader assumes otherwise) “For a fact.” The guard stood with his ale and wandered over to sit at the chair opposite Tamas. “You’ve a look about you, as well.” (Who said this? The reader assumes someone other than the guard) Tamas laughed. (oh wait. Tamas laughed, so belatedly I realize the writer misdirected me above, and the naked dialogue above belongs to the guard. Reader caught that late, but caught it, and is still onboard, but super wary) “All my life folks have told me that. I hail from Othur, though, as you might tell by my manner of speech.” (Tamas laughed, but then someone else said this in reply, maybe?) The guard leaned in, putting both elbows on the table. (oh wait, was the line above the guard's or Tamas'? Very confused, now. Not a clue, here) “Your speech is not so different.” (ah, hell. Who said this? By convention I suppose not the guard, but I've been messed with all over this page, so....) Everything hereafter is kosher, but by now the reader can't assume anything, and will assume they are supposed to be misdirected by the writer's terrible paragraph handling: “Othur is not so far. Hundred miles, south by southeast, as the buzzards may choose to fly.” The man leaned back, now putting a hand to the flintlock at his side. Maintaining eye contact with the man felt like a good idea. That way he’d not miss the flinch. Now, first shove the table into his gut then be sure to blow both barrels and reload before anybody blinks. “These women—” “Our uncle died. Pa sent me to fetch them to our home before they came to no-good account. They ain’t too keen on it.” “And yet they sit clear over there.” Now, by ripping actions and thought out from under the actor's words, this is completely unreadable. When the actor acts then we fall to his dialogue, the reader assumes someone else spoke. In the cases of naked dialogue, we can't trust that it's actually someone new, so you might as well take that off the table. In the case of non-verbal dialogue (actions taking the place of words), we have readers guessing if that belongs to the spoken words above or below. In other words, the reader can't trust you one bit. You have destroyed the relationship between the reader and the writer, and that book is in the trash can. If you do not maintain same actor/same paragraph, these are the loses: 1) You can no longer be trusted with naked dialogue. 2) You can no longer be trusted with unspoken dialogue. 3) You can no longer engage in free discourse. 4) You have to dialogue tag every single line of dialogue. 5) Over the course of an entire novel, no reader will survive your book. And that is why this is the best writing advice you have ever received.
I think it's important to distinguish between routine action beats and true description or narration. If the sentence is just a regular action beat pertaining to a specific character, I don't think a new pair paragraph should be used if the next line of dialogue is from the same character. On the other hand, if the previous paragraph of description expresses some moment of reflection or pivotal decision the character is facing, I think it may be OK to break this rule for effect and stylistic reasons, i.e. start a new paragraph or maybe even insert a blank line. Assuming the context clues are there to indicate it's their words of dialogue. This is just my opinion though. Not sure if this is common.
Well, I have certainly seen folks who didn't do as I suggest, and in some cases successfully. Now, if this is what the writer chooses to do, it's just like the idea of not using quotes in dialogue. YOU HAVE NEW CONSTRAINTS. For example, you can't assume that a writer has dropped to a new speaker in naked dialogue. You can no longer assume that unspoken dialogue is interpretted as a new player. You have to tag at least twice as often. The amount of maintenance language goes way up. Now, all of that kind of thing is fine, if that is what you choose to burden yourself and your reader with. I know it can be done. I could certainly pull it off. But, I've written a solid three dozen full novels, and to saddle my work with all that extra trash, to me, is like kicking a hornet's nest over and over again. Cute, but there't not much future in it.
It's not really a stretch. You can do almost any kind of bad paragraph or dialogue mechanics and make it physically work by adding in all sorts of directors or by severely limiting the number of actors on the stage. It doesn't take a genius. It just takes an awareness that one has created a problem for oneself and found an awkward and otherwise unnecessary solution.
I tend not to agree with 'you have to' or 'you must' types of commentary. Even if the advice is good and widely applicable, it's not universal. I mention modernist because authors like Virginia Woolf have switched the viewpoint character (e.g. who is thinking) multiple times within the same paragraph and even switch within the same sentence and not saddled their work with a bunch of extraneous nonsense in the process. Probably wouldn't work for highly commercial fiction but it worked for her and she's still read 80 years after her death.
But did she have to ask before she did it, or was she aware enough of convention that any prior 'musts' and 'have tos' had no effect on her?
Didn't matter in her day. Omniscient POV was all over the place. And non-standard dialogue construction. It was kind of like improvisational jazz before radio made music "popular" and somebody figured out which structure would be most appealing to the paying public.
Well, of course. Lots of folks have done lots of things, so if the writer can convince me that what they are doing is readable and enjoyable and well thought out, I'm 100% onboard and the first person to lay on the compliment. I will take exception, however, to the notion that anything I wrote has anything whatsoever to do with modern literature or with commercial products. Empowering your work with empowered choices is far removed from the trivialization implied by suggesting it is a "sellout" to modern trends. That's because many sound processes are actually empowering and designed to maximize a writer's flexibility along all fronts. I am not made more creative by saddling myself with the need to restrict my work to more tags or fewer characters or more constrained ways of laying out the prose, in order to avoid the pitfalls that I put in front of my work in the name of "creativity". I'm just saying. Others should disagree because, hey, it'd be no fun if everyone agreed.
All true. I should have phrased it differently. What I'm getting at is anybody who's going to break convention successfully will either already understand it or the material they're inspired by. Or they'll be experienced enough in the craft to see their expression as largely boundless and make something like House of Leaves. It's unspoken that every character in your next book can be named Steve, or that it has an unaddressed non-chronological narrative, or that it's a story told through a series of travel pamphlets, or that it incorporates multimedia (scratch and sniff?). No writer on his deathbed is going to bemoan that he wasn't given permission by another writer to try something experimental. All of that stuff always goes without saying.
