dialogue
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Do you enjoy writing dialogue? Then why not write a story that’s dialogue-only? This is the requirement for one of Writing Magazine‘s latest competitions. ‘No attribution, no description – just tell us what was said. You’ll need to use all your narrative skills to paint a scene, define a character and tell a story, while
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Here’s part seven in my writing dialogue series. Here are parts one, two, three, four, five and six. Now for part seven: Use dialogue to break up big blocks of narrative text. It aids readability, as well as injecting pace into the story. ***
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Here’s part six in my writing dialogue series. If you missed part one, click here. For part two, click here. For part three, you’ll find it here , for part four, click here and for part five, it’s here. Now for part six: At the end of a passage of speech, don’t add a full
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Here’s part four in my writing dialogue series. If you missed part one, click here. For part two, click here. For part three, you’ll find it here. Now for part four: ‘He said’ or ‘she said’ are fine as dialogue tags. There’s no need for lots of variations e.g. he/she yelled, shouted, screeched, shrieked, expressed,
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Here’s part three in my writing dialogue series. If you missed part one, click here. For part two, click here. Tip three: You want your dialogue to sound realistic, but if you listen to people talking, every day speech is full of ‘um’s, ‘ah’s, ‘er’s, ‘you know’s etc. Don’t add these to your dialogue. The
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Here’s part two in my writing dialogue series. If you missed part one, click here. Tip two: When more than one character is speaking, you must place each character’s speech into different paragraphs. Otherwise it can be difficult to work out who is saying what e.g.: “How much is that dress?” Sian asked the shop
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It isn’t easy to write convincing dialogue and it’s something many writers struggle with. Even if you get the words right, there seem to be so many rules and regulations concerning how it should be set out, the punctuation etc. Over the following few weeks, I’ll be giving you some tips on how to build
Esther Chilton 