Vivid, convincing dialogue

[phantasy19]

Phantasy19 provides good examples of setting the mood, but the punctuation is wrong.

"Katie." He wraps her hair in his hands, guiding her open mouth towards his cock. "Please."

vs

"Katie." He bites his lip as she mounts him, grinning. "Please."

You can certainly use actions instead of speech tags -- I do this a lot and so do many others -- but you still have to punctuate properly. Just because the speech tag isn't there doesn't mean you use the same punctuation.

I stand corrected, thanks
I had speech punctuation fine my whole life until I read one book that gave terrible advice on it and now I can never remember which is the correct method.

I'll go and look it up to make sure, but correct me if I'm wrong here:

"Hello," he said.

That's gramatically correct, yes?

 

[sr71plt]

"Hello," he said.

That's gramatically correct, yes?

Yes, it is.

 

[Perfideous]

Okay, so go eat a lemon, it might sweeten up your disposition. See, I have a sense of humor too, and I don't even need you to die for it to be funny.

No you don't; deep down you've still got the Mayflower Mentality. Pleasure; the first step to depravity.

 

[Perfideous]

[nitpick]When "Flying Circus" started screening on PBS in mid-1974 and became an instant success, the oldest of the Pythons was not yet 35. Also, if I have the dates right, Terry Gilliam was American for the first 26 years of his life.[/nitpick]

Funny thing is, a lot of Python's humour was a reaction to British seriousness. In the words of a Mr. J. Cleese:

"Wanda, do you have any idea what it's like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone, 'Are you married?' and hearing, ' My wife left me this morning,' or saying, uh, ' Do you have children?' and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we're all terrified of embarrassment. That's why we're so - dead."

True but the English are unbelievably good at taking the piss with a straight face. I stand by what I say; Americans are just incredibly serious.

None of this has anything to do with the original post which I think raises a subject worth exploring. I might add that one does not need a PHD in Put Downs to post on it either and we are all entitled to have a say.

At the end of the day all we are trying to do is tell a story. It doesn't need to be Tolstoy.

 

[SandraMustard]

This thread is about dialogue, isn't it? I've been traveling and only just now read it from the beginning; toward the end it was hard to tell.

In my limited writing experience, I've relied heavily on advice, much of it suggesting the power of good dialogue. I've practiced many of the points made here but still have gained a new one or two from this thread. Dialogue is the most likely thing I will rewrite to make my stories better. One trick I had suggested to me and I use is to read dialogue out loud to my husband (or have him read it to me).

I don't turn off Word's grammar checker because I want to catch unintended errors but I do purposely violate rules to make it sound realistic. We all speak in incomplete sentences, use idioms and colloquial expressions, speak shortcuts (use contractions), and get lazy in enunciation (drop ending 'g'). I try to get enough of those things to sound true yet not tire the reader.

One last thing I want to mention, I try to enhance a character with certain catch-words/phrases. For instance, a girl address another as "Chickie" or one use a phrase "lucky dog". I don't overdo it, 2 or 3 times in a whole novel is enough. Sometimes, one time is powerful enough. I had one southern girl say 'shouldna' instead of shouldn't have. It's part of getting 'into' the character you are trying to represent to the reader.