dialogue: part two
Hello.
Hello! Well that’s all very well, but we can’t even tell that someone said it…
“Hello!”
Great, now we know it’s dialogue. The ‘speech marks’ have been used. They’re those things that look like a ’66’ and a ’99’. See how the punctuation is inside the speech marks?
But who is saying hello?
“I know there’s someone here,” said the little man, peering around the door.
OK, now the punctuation has changed. It’s not a full stop at the end of the speech because the ‘speech tag’ is part of the whole sentence. The speech marks still only enclose the words that are actually spoken.
“Who is it?” he asked.
Normally there is a capital letter after a question mark or an exclamation mark! But the speech tag is still part of that same sentence and so it isn’t capitalised…
His nose twitched. “Something smells so good! Is it stew?”
The bit about his nose isn’t a tag. It is a sentence in its own right.
“Where,” he asked, “are all our things?”
Here the speech tag is in the middle of the dialogue.
Only the words that are directly spoken are enclosed in the speech marks.
There is a comma after the ‘where’ inside the speech marks. The comma for the tag remains outside the speech marks.
The second half of the speech sentence begins with a small letter because it is part of the same sentence.
“Oh hello there, are you one of the little men who lives here?” asked a young girl with jet black hair walking into the kitchen from a back room.
“Don’t come any closer!” The little man raised his fists in front of his face. “I may be small, but I have six brothers. They’ll be here any minute.”
“I’m not here to hurt you. Look I’ve made you all a lovely dinner and tidied up.”
“But where is all our stuff?”
“What are you looking for? I think perhaps you are Dopey?”
“I’m Dopey alright, but I want my pipe!”
“Here it is, I put it in the smoking cupboard, see? You just sit down with that and I’ll put the kettle on for the others coming home.”
“The smoking cupboard now is it?” Dopey scratched his head and sat down hard in his favourite chair. “Well, I never did,” he said.
So, every new character talking gets their own line.
Once you have established who is talking you can get rid of some of the speech tags as it is obvious who is talking. (See more on speech tags here.)
I hope this has helped you to work out some of the main rules of writing dialogue.
For more on writing dialogue, see this page. And check out my other writing tips here.