Dialogue

Evan Marshall, in The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing, provides straightforward advice: “Follow the specialized rules of punctuation in dialogue.”[i]…

Dialogue is a literary device that mimics real speech, according to Renni Browne and Dave King in Self-Editing for Fiction…

“For some reason, placing adverbs after the word ‘said’ has both passionate advocates and detractors,” according to Nancy Kress, in…

Nothing advances plot as well as a good scene. During the process of creating a scene, an author may use…

A key ingredient of any scene is the character attempting to achieve a goal. If the scene is to be…

Writers present a character’s speech by means of the fiction-writing mode of conversation, commonly known as dialogue. By some accounts, dialogue accounts for half of fiction (as in “the world of prose and the world of dialogue”). Whether or not such a classification is useful to fiction writers (probably not), it illustrates the lofty regard with which dialogue is held.

An important aspect of writing well is avoiding dialogue abuses and misuses.