Bastet's Chosen wrote:

         I wrote a short story consisting entirely of dialogue once.

Actually, first person narratives are nothing but dialogue, but of course,
that's not what you really mean. ^_^


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.

I would use those very sparingly. After all, people don't want to read about
nothing.

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,

If it goes for any length, this is true. Having nothing but conversation
between three plus people can be very hard to follow, unless there are very
distinctive patterns to each person's speech. It gets confusing fast. I
actually used that fact to my advantage once in a mystery Ranma fic I did
that opened up with nothing but dialogue. I intentionally led the reader to
believe there were three people in the room, when there was in fact four.
Looking back, the reader can figure out the fourth person's dialogue, but
only in hindsight (hopefully)

 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.

Yep. Another good way of doing things.

 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.

Still, a piece of dialogue might involve one person going on for a bit.
Confessing feelings perhaps, or something similar.

 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.

That's a touch more difficult. After all, people usually don't describe what
the person in front of them is doing verbally.

DB Sommer



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