At 10:16 AM -0400 22/10/2004, Bastet's Chosen wrote:
I wrote a short story consisting entirely of dialogue once. For
shorter pauses, commas work well, even if they aren't grammatically
correct. Elipses are good for longer pauses. A set of quotes with nothing
in it, or just an ellipse ("" or ". . .") is good to indicate where one
person stopped speaking and the other didn't say anything. Two of those
can indicate that both people were silent for a while.
More generally, it's good to have only two people involved in any
conversation, and they always alternate speaking, even if one person only
says ". . .". Address people by name when the speaker or the listener is
unclear; in a chat between Hitomi and Van, if the person is addressing
Hitomi, then the speaker must be Van. Keep each bit of dialogue short,
don't give speeches. You'll avoid having to deal with a second paragraph
of speech by the same person, and most of the tension and drive in your
story will be the interaction of people, so you want to keep them
interacting. Finally, you can set apart individual conversations with a
scene break. Remember that you still need to include relevant information
about what people are doing, where they are, and how they look, without it
being obvious that you're just adding it to the dialogue so the reader can
know it.
Hmm. I wrote a longish section of "Autumn and Spring" that was nothing
but telepathic dialogue once, with three "speakers". I got around the
problem of distinguishing speakers by using different quoting characters
for each: [], {} and <>. A bit of a cheat, perhaps, and not something
that you could really justify in "normal" speech.
(On the other hand, I've seen a published SF series where the author
used different speech marks depending on the _species_ of the speaker.
Yeah, it was Piers Anthony, and yeah, it wasn't a very good series.)
Cheers,
Angus