Tag Archives: dialog

Say That Again, Would You?

August 29, 2010 – 10:12 am

Dialog is one of the bedrock necessities in about 99% of all fiction. Plays and screenplays are almost nothing but dialog, and it’s not unusual to see whole scenes or entire short stories that are told entirely in dialog (sometimes, without even speech tags to let the reader know who’s talking). It’s something that seems [...]

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Dialog

May 5, 2010 – 10:54 am

Dialog is the primary way most of us communicate with each other, so it’s also the main way our characters communicate with each other. It’s really hard to write a satisfactory short story that has no dialogue at all, and the longer this story, the harder it is to tell without ever having one character talk [...]

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First person, part the first

January 25, 2010 – 2:00 pm

As I’ve said before, the term “viewpoint” gets used to mean both the person who is seeing the action (viewpoint character) and the way in which everything is written (viewpoint type). This is going to be about the latter sort of viewpoint. Specifically, it’s about first-person.
First-person viewpoint is the “I” viewpoint: “I hate pickled beets. [...]

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He said, she said

December 3, 2009 – 12:07 pm

A speech tag is the thing that goes with a line of dialog that tells you who said it; it “tags” the line with the name (or occupation, or some other identifiable description) of the person who said it.
“Run!” Jeff cried.  (”Jeff cried” is the speech tag.)
Jane said, “I can’t.” (”Jane said” is the speech [...]

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