Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022

Dialogue and its discontents
The realities of fiction
The stuff in the front

✵Fond as I am of semicolons, they’re ungainly in dialogue. Avoid them.

✵In real-life conversation, how often do you say the name of the person you’re talking to?

Not that much?

Then why do your characters do it so frequently?

✵There’s an awful lot of murmuring in fiction nowadays. There’s also, I note, a great deal of whispering, quite a lot of it hoarse. You might offer your hoarse whisperer a cup of tea or a lozenge.

✵Italics for emphasis in dialogue can be helpful, but use them sparingly. For one thing, readers don’t always relish being told, in such a patently obvious fashion, how to read. For another, if the intended emphasis in any given line of dialogue can’t be detected without the use of italics, it’s possible that your given line of dialogue could use a bit of revision anyway. Among other solutions, try tossing the bit that needs emphasis to the end of a sentence rather than leaving it muddling in the middle.

✵Go light on exclamation points in dialogue. No, even lighter than that. Are you down to none yet? Good.^*9

✵I’ll wager your characters can make themselves heard without capital letters. Use italics for shouting, if you must. And, yes, exclamation points—one at a time. No boldface, please, not ever.

✵One especially well-attended school of thought endorses setting off dialogue with nothing fancier than “he said” and “she said.” I’ve encountered enough characters importuning tearily and barking peevishly (phenomena that often result from the injudicious use of the thesaurus I mentioned above) that I’m not unsympathetic to that suggestion of restraint, but there’s no reason to be quite so spartan should your characters occasionally feel the need to bellow, whine, or wheedle. Please, though: moderation. A lot of this:

he asked helplessly

she cried ecstatically

she added irrelevantly

he remarked decisively

objected Tom crossly

broke out Tom violently

is hard to take.

✵If your seething, exasperated characters must hiss something—and, really, must they?—make sure they’re hissing something hissable.

“Take your hand off me, you brute!” she hissed.

—CHARLES GARVICE, Better Than Life (1891)

Um, no, she didn’t. You try it.

“Chestnuts, chestnuts,” he hissed. “Teeth! teeth! my preciousss; but we has only six!”

—J.R.R. TOLKIEN, The Hobbit (1937)

OK, now we’re cooking.

✵Inserting a “she said” into a speech after the character’s been rattling on for six sentences is pointless. If you’re not setting a speech tag before a speech, then at least set it early on, preferably at the first possible breathing point.

✵Something, something, something, she thought to herself.

Unless she’s capable of thinking to someone else—and for all I know your character is a telepath—please dispose of that “to herself.”

✵In olden times, one often saw articulated thought—that is, dialogue that remains in a character’s brain, unspoken—set in quotation marks, like dialogue. Then, for a while, italics (and no quotation marks) were all the rage. Now, mostly such thoughts are simply set in roman, as, say:

I’ll never be happy again, Rupert mused.

As it’s perfectly comprehensible, and as no one likes to read a lot of italics, I endorse this.

✵Speaking of articulated thought, I’m not entirely persuaded that people, with any frequency, or at all, blurt out the thoughts they’re thinking.

And when they do, I doubt very much that they suddenly clap their hands over their mouths.

✵“Hello,” he smiled.

“I don’t care,” he shrugged.

No.

Dialogue can be said, shouted, sputtered, barked, shrieked, or whispered—it can even be murmured—but it can’t be smiled or shrugged.

The easiest solutions to such things are:

“Hello,” he said with a smile.

“Hello,” he said, smiling.

or the blunter

“Hello.” He smiled.

The better solution is not to employ these constructions in the first place.