Dialogue

No matter your theme, tone, tense, or plot, your story is going to include characters talking to other characters, and sometimes even to themselves. Dialogue is all the conversation that happens in a story. This is commonly where new writers struggle the most, and writing good dialogue is difficult at times even for the best writers. There are several general rules for writing dialogue that you should take into consideration during your writing.

Inner dialogue is when your character is talking (or thinking) to themselves. This is very common in storytelling and allows the reader to gain insight to how your character thinks and their motivations. The thing to remember with inner dialogue is that thoughts don’t need to be in quotation marks, but you need to make it clear that it’s a thought - many writers use italics to indicate inner dialogue.

Example: Great, the hero thought, now I’ve got to figure out how to do that, too.
“Great,” the hero said to no one, “now I’ve got to figure out how to do that, too.”

Note that only the words of the thought itself are italicized, but when speaking out loud it’s treated as outer dialogue.

Outer dialogue is when a character speaks to another, or to themselves out loud. This will likely make up a sizable chunk of your story, and it is important to follow a few simple rules to ensure your story moves along without confusing the reader.

Use quotation marks whenever someone speaks. “I’m telling you, do the thing!” Punctuation always goes inside the quotation marks.

When a different person speaks, start a new paragraph. Even if it’s just a few words, this tells the reader it’s a different person.

Use and vary your dialogue tags, but don’t overdo it. Dialogue tags are words like, “said,” “yelled,” “whispered,” and so on. These can be combined with adverbs to really immerse the reader in the dialogue, but be careful with your usage. You don’t need to double up - “yelled loudly” or “whispered quietly” are redundant.

Dialogue tags help the reader understand who is speaking, but you don’t need to use them in every sentence, even when more than one person is speaking. Just be careful with their use - don’t assume your reader knows who is speaking simply because you do.

As you write, you also want to make sure each character has a distinct voice. An excitable Ewok will speak differently than an always-calm Chiss, for example. Some characters may use contractions exclusively, while another never uses contractions. Since dialogue is essentially verbal communication that has been written out, you can also ignore many of the rules of written grammar to a degree because people don’t always speak with perfect grammar. Just make sure that loosening of grammar rules doesn’t bleed over into the spaces where it should be correct.

The differing voices should be evident in your writing, including your dialogue tags.

That being said, try to avoid using “eye dialect” unless absolutely necessary. Eye dialect is using non-standard spelling to imply phonetic pronunciation differences. Eye dialect can be very off-putting for the reader, however, and can lead to confusion or loss of immersion for the reader. Consider using other ways to indicate heavy accents.

Example: “Yawl should know ah cain’t spell nuffin right, but ah wuz gunna try fer it anyhow.”

This certainly implies an accent, but requires the reader to go over it a few times to understand what’s being said. A better alternative would be something like:

“Y’all should know I can’t spell nothing right,” he drawled in his deep country accent, “but I was gonna try for it anyhow.”

Grammatically, there are a number of errors in the example above, but they can be forgiven as an artistic choice. It is more important that the reader understands what the character is saying than how they say it. Making the character talk in a way that takes the reader out of the story works against your purpose.