“This is your daily, friendly reminder to use commas instead of periods during the dialogue of your story,” she said with a smile.
“Unless you are following the dialogue with an action and not a dialogue tag.” He took a deep breath and sat back down after making the clarifying statement.
“However,” she added, shifting in her seat, “it’s appropriate to use a comma if there’s action in the middle of a sentence.”
“True.” She glanced at the others. “You can also end with a period if you include an action between two separate statements.”
Things I didn’t know
“And–” she waved a pen as though to underline her statement–“if you’re interrupting a sentence with an action, you need to type two hyphens to make an en-dash.”
You guys have no idea how many students in my advanced fiction workshop didn’t know any of this when writing their stories.
Annnd it’s been a year.
Might queue that up again because this knowledge is super needed all the time.
Paragraphs are also four to six sentences, then you put a break and start your next sentence.
Important
“What I find is that sometimes, someone will write a character who has a lot to say. And that character will need to talk for more than four to six sentences in order to deliver the necessary exposition. Maybe a king needs to motivate his army with a rousing speech, or maybe a scientist needs to tell her colleagues what is up with that alien space ship. Maybe they have come to an emotional understanding and just have a lot to say.
“Whatever the case, it is possible to have one person talking for more than a single paragraph! The grammatical way to do so is to not close the quotation in the first paragraph, but still start with a quotation mark in the new paragraph. Otherwise, a reader might assume a different person is talking,” the velociraptor droned on, heedless of the fact their audience had fallen asleep.
“You have a fair point. One must also be mindful of the format in which they are writing. A paragraph seven or eight lines long on a page can be easier for people to keep track of their place while reading, while anything more than three lines long on a computer screen can start to meld together.”
She poured herself a glass of water and took a sip before she continued.
“Another way to get around that is, when you reach the end of a sentence, stop and add some narration, but put the narration into a new, one-sentence paragraph. Then resume speaking in another new paragraph, breaking apart the block.”
@danaknowsitall THIS Is an excellent reference for writing dialogue.
