On dialogue tags

[SydneyBlake]

Concentrate on writing better dialogue first. Then deal with the tags.

Perhaps he would do well to READ MORE, and I mean someone well established, who writes dialogue well. Study their style, develop a feel for their rhythm. Then sit down and write.

 

[cocput]

Concentrate on writing better dialogue first. Then deal with the tags.

Easier said than done. Dialogues are a real bitch. It's taking more time than I had expected. The number of reference lookups needed for that is simply too much. Not that I'm not learning. The sheer volume of reading stories to learn about dialogues is too much. Learning to write story is still a free time work for me.

--scorpio

 

[cocput]

Perhaps he would do well to READ MORE, and I mean someone well established, who writes dialogue well. Study their style, develop a feel for their rhythm. Then sit down and write.

Believe me, I am doing that lot.
I can spent atmost 1-2 hrs a day, if I am not sick. i.e. if i don't have other pressing things like remembering to do laundry.

Four of my current stories were written when I was bedridden. Otherwise, I won't be able to sit to write as well.

For a proper story research, I will have to fall sick again. That's something I can't afford to be for the next 5 months.

 

[_Lynn_]

Perhaps he would do well to READ MORE, and I mean someone well established, who writes dialogue well. Study their style, develop a feel for their rhythm. Then sit down and write.

I agree.

We can learn how to write. Studying the work of other authors can teach us a great deal. But I think it's that natural ability some people have that takes their stories to that next level.

 

[cocput]

We can learn how to write. Studying the work of other authors can teach us a great deal. But I think it's that natural ability some people have that takes their stories to that next level.

I guess I just haven't learned to dream people talking yet.

It might help people interested in learning to do dialogue tags well, if someone could give a few references for the good authors.

My current research is limited to people who are hitting the Hall of Fame listings. I am unsure whether that's the place to look.

 

[SydneyBlake]

I guess I just haven't learned to dream people talking yet.

It might help people interested in learning to do dialogue tags well, if someone could give a few references for the good authors.

My current research is limited to people who are hitting the Hall of Fame listings. I am unsure whether that's the place to look.

What's your kink? If we know what you enjoy reading, maybe someone can supply a link to a well written story. That's no guarantee, tho. Anyone can post here, and being on the top lists doesn't mean the story isn't an editor's nightmare.

Google "how to write good dialogue."

I'm sorry to hear you've been sick, and I do sympathize with your lack of time, believe me. But I also find it frustrating when another writer asks for advice, but then dismisses said advice as undoable, for whatever reasons. I don't have time to do it for you. I apologize if that is harsh.

Edited to add: case in point about the top lists--I offer up myself as an example. You'd better look quick, tho, cuz the one series I have up is going away very soon.

 

[sr71plt]

Yep, spoon feeding can only go so far before it's time to drop out.

 

[cocput]

What's your kink? If we know what you enjoy reading, maybe someone can supply a link to a well written story. That's no guarantee, tho. Anyone can post here, and being on the top lists doesn't mean the story isn't an editor's nightmare.

Google "how to write good dialogue."

I also find it frustrating when another writer asks for advice, but then dismisses said advice as undoable, for whatever reasons. I don't have time to do it for you. I apologize if that is harsh.

I'm sorry if my words ended up meaning that I am unwilling to work. I never dismiss advice. I have already pestered 5 persons in the forum, and I am sure they will say that I bombarded them with doubt after doubt.

I have done the preliminary research on dialogues, and that's why I estimated that it's going to take more time, somewhere between 3-6 months.

I promised that I will push a very tough story, that everyone said was beyond my means, in x months. So, I am in a sort of fast track learning mode.

Lynn knows about some of my issues, and she was suggesting that I should focus on dialogues the way I was focusing on other things. I was responding that a man can only do so many things. But, she is right. Now that you two have advised me, I will be unconsciously focusing on dialogues as well.

I don't have a specific kink. I don't read horror, rape and kids. I don't read incest, if any character has a familiar name. Everything else goes.

Currently, I am writing incest (1 published with 3 parts, 2 getting edited, 1 incomplete, 3 in story-idea phase) and romance (3 getting edited, 4 in story-idea phase, including an unorthodox series which will eventually contain at least 5 standalone stories and one or two stories connecting the others). For getting help from others, I have put all incest on hold, and am focusing on romance.

Any help will be highly appreciated. I can wait.

--scorpio

 

[SydneyBlake]

I'm sorry if my words ended up meaning that I am unwilling to work. I never dismiss advice. I have already pestered 5 persons in the forum, and I am sure they will say that I bombarded them with doubt after doubt.
--scorpio

And with all due respect, I have my suspicions of someone who can post over 1000 messages on a forum in 4 months. Sounds to me like time and energy that could be better spent learning the craft through reading and study and practice.

 

[cocput]

And with all due respect, I have my suspicions of someone who can post over 1000 messages on a forum in 4 months. Sounds to me like time and energy that could be better spent learning the craft through reading and study and practice.

I was flabbergasted. I didn't understand what you said till I read the post a second time. It's like the way a friend pointed to me that I could have an AV.

I don't regret most of them, except for a few of the recent wasteful ones (I don't want to talk about it. Bad Juju).

Half the ones in Word Chain was done while doing donkey job. I think half the comments in my posts are about sleep or food. But the real ones that mattered were the few posts that I had pushed while writng/editing a story. The mere presence of the chain gang had lifted my spirit more than once.

The posts in many of the games had helped me in choosing words better. Some have taught me existence of words. ululate! I didn't know such a word existed.
I learned poetic meter with iambic

We learn a lot in our subconscious and unconscious mind. I don't believe that all my posts were a waste, "time and energy that could be better spent learning the craft through reading and study and practice" was in fact spent doing the exact same thing.

Though study didn't involve reading published books, half the complete and incomplete story ideas have come from apparently random posts. I learn in my own way.There were posts that took research, there were others that took harsh brainstorming sessions--ultimately all the threads that I had participated wholeheartedly had taught me something valuable.

Number of posts has nothing to do with my commitment. All it means is that I post a lot. I maybe posting while taking a break between two scenes of a story I was researching. It's a possibility? I don't know whether you too feel it, but reading a story is a pleasurable experience for me, but studying a story had always been work, requiring lots of breaks. What if the posts are proportional to the number of hours that I had spent on research?

Sorry for digressing from the main topic of the thread.

Is there any resource where all tags with similar looking moods/amplitudes are listed?
I tried google, but either I am using the wrong set of search keys, or I am just plain unlucky.

--scorpio

 

[mynameisben]

You are a fraud.

 

[SydneyBlake]

Look, I don't even have time to read all that. I'm done holding hands here.

 

[cocput]

I am here to learn. Nothing else matters.

 

[cocput]

I just read Hemingway's "Hills like white elephant" and the relevance of tags and multiple saids seems even more confusing.

There is an altercation going back and forth 13 times without a single dialogue tag.

Then he follows it up with another segment with 5 saids.

Worst of all, it's just man and girl. Why didn't he just name the characters?

The worst part is that i couldn't understand why all this doesn't hurt the story.

--scorpio

 

[Derroreaper]

Its a perfect example of why a formula wouldn't work for dialogue. Of course Hemingway had his on way of doing things.

 

[cocput]

But why didn't he use identification tags?
The only thing that looks like a name is 'Jig' in the conversation.
Is it because there only three people talking in the entire story?


He never used "muttered" or "shouted" or anything like that. For him, everything is plain said.
The scene where she says that she would do it, because she didn't care about herself, the only response of the man was: "What do you mean?" I thought the man would have been surprised or shocked or stunned to listen her words. But there is nothing to indicate it. Not even a "he raised his eye brows."

"Would you please please please... stop talking?"
I thought more than two please was wrong, and he is using seven.


--scorpio

 

[Derroreaper]

He wants you to draw your own conclusions, he wants you to fill in all the things he left out. Hemingway liked to tell stories, by not telling the whole story. He believed the things he didn't say were the most important parts.

He was admired as much for his writing style as he was for his writing.

As far as him not using tags, did you feel like you needed them? Did you get lost reading the story? I didn't, so I'll assume he didn't need anything more than what he included.

On a side note, I don't care much for that story personally

 

[PennLady]

But why didn't he use identification tags?
The only thing that looks like a name is 'Jig' in the conversation.
Is it because there only three people talking in the entire story?

People have said this numerous times -- there are no hard and fast rules for writing stories. So long as your story can be understood, it does not matter how many times you do or don't use said or any other dialogue tag. Some writers use "said" a lot, others don't, and neither way is better, or more right or more wrong.

Surely you have read stories, in English and/or your native languages, and you have noticed that people do not write in exactly the same way.

You may have more rules for the technical articles you mention, and that's fine, but that does not translate to fiction. If you are looking for a set of rules, you aren't going to find one, or you will find different sets which agree on some points and disagree on others.

You are getting bogged down in minutiae and asking questions that people probably can't answer. Why did Hemingway write the dialogue as he did? Because he wanted to -- because that was his style. That is the kind of answer you are going to get.

 

[cocput]

I re-visualized the story as an innocent bystander looking at the incident. That and your comments solved a lot of the problems I had asked.

It irritates me when I am unable to rationalize why some things are working.

I am slowly weening off my dependence on rules/lemmas/axioms. All my papers had been written with formulaic consistency. The context of every paragraph is predictable, and their content is predetermined. And, there is no dialogue or POV to pester me.

*

Is there a generic listing of all the dialogue tags that are used in fiction?
Or, do you people use only the tags that come to your mind as you write?

 

[snoopercharmbrights]

... It irritates me when I am unable to rationalize why some things are working. ...

There are things you simply cannot rationalise. The most obvious examples are poetry and jokes. Poetry paints pictures in the reader's mind using words and the sound and resonance of those words add to the meaning. Jokes use irrational discontinuity to evince laughter.

Neither can be explained by dictionary definitions of the words.

One silly example of the latter:

In mid-winter wife texts husband: WINDOWS FROZEN. WILL NOT OPEN
His reply: POUR ON WARM WATER
Wife's next text: COMPUTER COMPLETELY WRECKED NOW

 

[cocput]

lol.

Jokes, I understand. The twist of logic is what keeps it going. And twist always comes at the end.

Like the one:

"Your honour, I want divorce from this woman."

"Why do you want a divorce from the woman who had cared for you for the past nine years."

"Till yesterday, I DIDN'T KNOW THAT SHE WAS MY WIFE."

 

[lance gt]

In my recent series, A Life Moves In, in lesbian, I wrote all the dialogue without tags of any kind, having conversations with up to 5 people at a time. I haven't had any complaints by readers, that the conversation was hard to follow, or unsure of who was saying what. It's the first time I've tried doing it in this style, so I've been monitoring it for feedback and it seems positive.

I've used each person's speech patterns as a means of distinguishing each character's dialogue. I would welcome any thoughts on it, pro and con, if it's a workable formula, or I'm fluking out with it somehow.

 

[cocput]

In my recent series, A Life Moves In, in lesbian, I wrote all the dialogue without tags of any kind, having conversations with up to 5 people at a time. I haven't had any complaints by readers, that the conversation was hard to follow, or unsure of who was saying what. It's the first time I've tried doing it in this style, so I've been monitoring it for feedback and it seems positive.

I've used each person's speech patterns as a means of distinguishing each character's dialogue. I would welcome any thoughts on it, pro and con, if it's a workable formula, or I'm fluking out with it somehow.

can you post story link?

 

[lance gt]

http://www.literotica.com/s/a-life-moves-in-ch-04

Here's the link, Enjoy!

 

[Cinner]

http://www.literotica.com/s/a-life-moves-in-ch-04

Here's the link, Enjoy!

How have the other stories been going? Can I buy them yet?