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Managing Fictional Narrative Flow - Dialogue/Indirect Discourse
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 9
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The grammatical rules for dialogue simply require a little bit of practice to learn. There is any number of grammar books that can provide a list of rules, and with any of them you can begin to check your own dialogue. I use Diana Hacker's A Writer's Reference as a grammar guide for both my creative and academic writing, and I have yet to find a better book.
The basic rules are pretty simple:
- At the end of a quoted sentence, punctuation goes inside the quotes:
"When do you think we'll be leaving?"
"I didn't come here to talk business."
- When you introduce or end a line of dialogue with an attribution ("he said", "she said" etc.), it should be set off with a comma:
"I haven't had a chance to ask her for it," he says.
If the sentence is an exclamation or question followed by an attribution, the question mark or exclamation point replaces the comma:
"So when is a good time?" Donna asks.
- When you have a new speaker, start a new paragraph. Generally, actions or thoughts attributed to the speaking character are included as part of the same paragraph as that character's spoken lines. For example:
(Note: because it's much easier to code, I'm using a double space rather than a single space and indentation to indicate a new paragraph. In standard prose, a single space and an indentation would be used between paragraphs.)
"Forget going into the city," he says.
"Why?" she says. "It's not that late."
"I'm not interested."
"You have other plans?" she asks. Her tone shuts him up for a moment.
"If you think there's someone else, there isn't."
"It isn't any of my business," she says.
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