New answers tagged dialogue
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Language of other countries
I assume that you are writing in English and that the characters in your story speak Romanian.
Conventionally, if you want your characters to use a non-English term, you would explain it to your ...
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Language of other countries
Readers almost certainly won't get confused, because a person's name is not always the same as what people call that person. If they do get confused, you can fix it easily enough.
For example, most ...
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Language of other countries
You can do it like that, but if everyone calls her Bunica (which I assume means grandmother), there's no reason why you should be afraid of being consistent and calling her Bunica in the narrative too....
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How to create dialogue in a book?
It might vary depending on the language you intend to write for, but these are general rules I wrote (Tumblr blog) on how to edit dialog since I found a lot of advice to be pedantic and not useful.:
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Accepted
Can my narrator's thoughts be in the same paragraph as another character's dialogue?
tl;dr
Thoughts that are direct unspoken replies to dialogue need to be given their own paragraph.
Explanation
By definition, the narration (that is, the text you read) consists entirely of the ...
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Can my narrator's thoughts be in the same paragraph as another character's dialogue?
You've recently noticed it in the books you've read and... what's your reaction? Does it bother you? Does it make you trip up in confusion what belongs where? Do you find it annoying? Do you feel ...
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Can my narrator's thoughts be in the same paragraph as another character's dialogue?
What you are describing is an action beat.
Using action beats to illustrate character's reactions to dialogue is a terrific practice. It add depth and substance to the moment on the page, and is an ...
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Does every piece of dialogue need a dialogue tag like "she said"?
In any dialog, you have to ensure that the reader knows who said what. There are, however, three ways to ensure that.
Explicitly, attributing it to the speaker: "It's going to rain," she ...
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Does every piece of dialogue need a dialogue tag like "she said"?
In ficion today, we add she said and similar dialogue tags only when it is unclear who is speaking. Otherwise we avoid them.
Turntaking (that is, when the speaker changes) is signalled by a paragraph ...
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Spoken lists in dialogue
This question is a good example for when you need to (a) observe how people speak in the real world and (b) act out your dialogue yourself and see what you would do.
I think there are about three ways ...
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