Posts tagged dialogue
So I've got a bit: Alta blinked. She pushed on, smiling, “—the argument. When the argument succeeds, which I still don’t fully deem, even after that—it looks to me like you’ve still got to do a...
I am writing a fantasy novella that ends up using a lot of internal monologues, often mixed with dialogue, descriptions, and other character's monologues. For example, this excerpt from the first c...
When writing a novel how would one best represent background dialogue from a radio or television that is perhaps only half heard by the characters but still important for the reader? Should I have ...
A narrator is writing a letter about the last 6 months of his father's life, a narrative which includes around 5 individual scenes, some of which have extensive back and forth dialog. How should th...
If, for example, someone said : "How are you today?", how would you go about "translating" this into sounding like they were talking with a full-mouth? Like, phonetically.
When writing dialogue all the characters sound the same. I'm not sure I even know what giving a character a voice means, but my dialogue sucks so any advice will be greatly appreciated.
If I'm writing a dialog and my character get interrupted and cut off in the middle of a sentence can I write half a word and put three dots? I thought it was okay to do this, but I realized that I ...
I'm new to narrative writing and especially have trouble with dialogue. I too often am using the word well to start a character's sentence after receiving some information to then ask a question ab...
I have this young character who grows up to be very strong and powerful but while he was young he was still discovering how strong he was. This incident happened to a friend he's protective of. W...
When I use dialogue within the stories I write I have a bad habit of writing dialogue after dialogue without indication as to who is talking. An example is when I do this in a story “Arden! Dar...
Might be a bit nitpicky - but I really want to get the formatting correct - especially because this is one of the first lines in the script. The screen name is: ArgyleMan29 Like this? JACK: Onlin...
Dialogue is my favorite thing to write. I tend to use a lot of dialogue in my writing, which sometimes results in long, talky passages -- a bit similar to this question about breaking up exposition...
There’s a Quadbike going down a hill, the two people on the quad are talking, but you can’t see their mouths move. You know it’s them talking as you saw them talk before and know their voices... m...
What are the guidelines on using questions in dialog (between ignorant characters) to expose setting and backstory? A few exchanges between my characters seem to fall flat. I'm trying to sort out...
I have a technical question. In my story, I've several chunks of dialog where one character's response is a grunt or a groan or rude sound or a swear word, or whatever, but is not in quotes. As a...
I have a character in my story who has the habit of making philosophic observations about life and the functioning of things, or his opinion/vision about something. Although most of his observati...
Would the line: "Peter!" cried his father. make grammatical sense? It seems to work intuitively, but I'm just not sure. It's also a tough question to google, as it turns out, so any reply wou...
I recently watched Aaron Sorkin's Masterclass on screenwriting. One frustrating section of it (overall it's quite good, IMHO) is about dialog, and Sorkin says that dialog is important, it can't be ...
I've written myself into a sci-fi cliche which I have never seen done well: two characters meet in virtual reality. The gist of my scene is one character has been in a pseudocoma, more aware of he...
I'm not talking about if it's right to go like: "See you later, Mom!" Sierra grabbed an apple and ran out of the front door. I'm more concerned with something I remember seeing but can't remember ...
How much dialogue to use when novel writing? I find it so boring and unimaginative to write, but yet when I read I appreciate that it often provides key information for the story. How much is too ...
Is directly showing a characters inner thoughts and conversations with themselves too telly or cheesy?
When writing dialogue I usually just make one character say whatever I want them to say and then write "said" at the end, but I feel like I'm doing it wrong. What is the correct way to write dial...
I’m writing a scene that is on a phone call. I don't want to hear one person in a voiceover. Instead, I want to cut back and forth between the two people speaking. Do I have to use a new scene h...
I'm a contemporary romance author writing a romance Christmas book. The hero in my story has a six year old girl. There are lots of conversations with the six year old, but when I read my story bac...
In my novel my protagonist speaks to a man while being held at gun point. She (protagonist) tried to kill him. He was her boss, was involved in her best friend's death and wants the protagonist dea...
Like many, I’m a huge fan of the HBO series True Detective. I was reading the script for the second episode and I noticed this: INT. STATE CID - NIGHT Hart and Cohle enter the squad room, acknowle...
In my script, there is an AI chatbot character - ANNIE - that real characters communicate with via text. ANNIE has animated reactions and has an artificial speaking voice. Would I write ANNIE’S...
I'm hoping for guidance on several very similar situations, which I suspect are all meant to be punctuated and spaced differently. Stuttering How would you write someone stuttering out the word "...
Something I always get stuck with is how to describe a first date. E.g. I have a story where 2 characters are on a blind date, so they have to get to know each other. How much of the date should be...
I'm writing a story about a creature that takes the shape of a human and travels seeing the world. This character has no clue about this new reality, as he had no body before this incarnation, and ...
I'm at a crossroads to figure out the better plan of action. I've heard you should always try to finish the rough draft, but...are there exceptions? I'm wondering if any readers here ran into this,...
I'm writing a conversation between some no-good thievin' teens, and one of them has stolen a wallet, which has turned out to be that of an FBI member. They converse, written in indirect speech, wh...
I'm writing my first novel, and I'm using a style that seems fine to me, but I'm not positive I'm punctuating correctly. I hate overusing dialog tags. I like the technique of sometimes avoiding th...
For each line of dialog, I have three pieces of text: the dialog itself, and two things I call Subtext1 and Subtext2 for now. Dialog: Self-explanatory, the only thing actually "visible" to the rea...
I was just wondering if anybody had some tips on how to avoid repetitively describing characters' actions in the same way? Here is an example which I'm struggling to reform, mostly because I keep u...
I am thinking about setting my story in a postapocalyptic world where all art and literature are gone, and people are mostly illiterate. People lost the ability to formulate deep thoughts, became i...
I am writing a novel. I'm not sure if the below sentence structure is correct. I have not used any word like said/replied/asked. He was looking at the painting. “You do not have to believe me. ...
How to write silent communication? Humans communicate in a lot of different ways, often concurrently. While writing dialogue I frequently find myself interrupting the lines to add stuff like the fo...
"The reason you suck speech" is a trope, that is described as: A character gives a speech on why someone or something is shit. And here's an example: Well done. Here come the test results: You...
I decided to included some offensive language in one of my novels as many novels do. I was wondering however at what point does it become poor dialogue or just plain bad English. Obviously I'm not ...
Shakespeare did it, he did it quite a lot of times, but there are a few problems with it: He was a screenwriter in an age, where we couldn't afford building enough sets (or cities that don't catc...
I'm speaking of more than one action line with no other text between them. I guess I'm asking if this is done because they relate to very different actions or actions of different people, etc. plea...
I was wondering if anyone was aware of a quality guide or text translator that would allow for realistic accented dialog speech? Say I wanted to write a character with a Texan Drawl or a heavy Bro...
I'm writing a sci-fi script for a T.V. pilot (my first) in which there is, initially, an AI (that runs a spaceship) with no avatar (that comes later). It is not a narration when that "character" sp...
I'm writing a story about mental telepathy. In it, I have telepathic dialog between two characters. First let me say that I've been writing internal dialog i.e., thoughts, using italics. Example...
In my story there are some words in there that even Grammarly couldn't understand, but they make sense in the story. They're slang, or things teenagers might say. Here is an example of what I am t...
I'm working on a short story that has two characters debating a philosophical view. Other than the inherent conflict built into the two opposing stances taken by the characters on the topic, it av...
Let's say two characters are conversing and one character interrupts the other in mid-sentence. How would that actually be shown in dialog? I have seen some use a hyphen at the end of the sentence ...
When I'm writing dialogue, I have a problem figuring out what is the appropriate thing to say in the conversation. Could you please help?