posted
Now, the rule of thumb in my mind is that no more than two dialog sentences per paragraph.
Question is, and I've seen this rule broken, so when is it acceptible to have continuing dialog with intermittent action, all in one paragraph? Can there be a second action beat following the dialog? Or multiple sentences, after a double dialog.
Can you form a large paragraph around multiple dialogs with beats placed between them? Or should they be broken up?
generic example:
“Got to go, I’m meeting—what am I doing,” she said as she put the dress back. “You know who I’m meeting. Please, just let it go, I’m fine.” She checked the time and walked out of the thrift store.<---does this sentence belong within the first sentence dialog tag even though the action falls after the dialog or can it stay? Or should it be moved to its own paragraph?
AND, if the second beat can stay, can it then be followed with more dialog if it continues on the same subject matter?
Common sense tells me they should be broken up, but I'm not clear on this type of paragraph rule.
posted
An overall paragraph syntax principle advises one relevant idea per one paragraph; more than one idea, separate paragraphs per idea.
The sample paragraph above contains a single relevant idea: a meeting to go to. The four sentences also are a stepped transition setup. A next scene continuation would portray a transition follow-through and arrival. Also, an interim scene might intervene and the meet timely left for partial tension satisfaction later.
The use of "as" in the first dialogue sentence attribution amendment is problematic. Also, the speech attribution tag itself could be more artfully placed.
"'Got to go[.] I'm meeting—what am I doing[?]' she said[,] as she put the dress back."
As is, takes the period, question mark, and comma, prescriptively.
"as" used to mean while is an artless conjunction use. English usage dictionaries allow that "as" conjunction use is somewhat unextraordinary in everyday idiomatic speech and dialectical uses though describe particular prose uses; that is, for a causal conjunction (instead of because, while, since, "causal" is the emphasis facet); relative pronoun, and formal conjunction substitute for that, if, and whether. In any case, for dependent, often nonessential, appositive content. The general difficulty of "as" conjunction use is its common occasion for ambiguity.
Causal and ambiguous conjunction "as" use, another test of logic that fails:
//As she put the dress back, "Got to go, I'm meeting—what am I doing?" she said.//
//As she put the dress back, she said, "Got to go, I'm meeting—what am I doing?"//
"'Got to go, I’m meeting—what am I doing[?]' she said[,] [and] put the dress back."
and substituted is less ambiguous and an apt test for valid logic: not simultaneous, at best sequential, or perhaps or not contemporaneous. Which action naturally and necessarily comes first? The speech or put the dress back on the rack?
Plus, where, best practice, place the attribution tag? At a first timely, natural break, after a verb-predicate, or complete clause, or interjection word or phrase (sentence fragment), all for the sake of apt emphasis of a main idea.
//"Gotta go," she said. "I'm meeting—what am I doing?" and put the dress back.//
//"Gotta go," she said. "I'm meeting—what am I doing?" She put the dress back.//
//"Gotta go," she said, and put the dress back. "I'm meeting—what am I doing?"//
If more dialogue followed, could be relevant or not. If relevant, close up into the paragraph; if not, separate paragraph. However, the transition setup is complete and best practice the scene's end. Unless who "she" converses with, if anyone and not a soliloquy, delays her departure (a refusal, up to three escalated, persuasive refusals and response rationales for her departure). Then that dialogue, or several conversation exchange lines, is a separate paragraph, or paragraphs.
Plus, any further relevant dialogue, actions, and sensations might be incorporated in the paragraph, related to departure and implied refusal, even if she herself contradicts her want to leave, like takes the dress back off the rack.
No prose principle prescribes whether dialogue must be a single block, or limited to a few lines per paragraph, nor other composition modes that might wrap and interleaven dialogue: description, introspection, action, narration, emotion, sensation, summarization, exposition, (conversation), recollection, explanation, transition, DIANE'S SECRET, and apt combinations thereof. However, a best practice is relevant, unified, timely, judicious, sometimes brief paragraphs.
However, high school English essay composition "rules" prescribe a limited number of sentences per paragraph, varies from four or so up to, say, eight or so, and likewise limit the number of paragraphs. The Five Paragraph format is a common high school composition practice anymore. First paragraph is a thesis statement, three thesis support paragraphs, a thesis conclusion paragraph. The format is a truncated version of the Toulmin Argumentation Essay format, which contains at least eight parts: claim asserted, claim rationale, three claim supports, claim objections anticipated, claim objections rebutted, claim conclusion.
Other syntax-grammar-punctuation considerations for the paragraph:
//"Gotta go," she said. "I'm meeting—what am I doing? She put the dress back. "You know who I'm meeting. Please just let it go[.] I'm fine." She checked the time[,] walked out of the thrift store.//
posted
Self-imposed rule of thumb? One of creative composition's harder challenges is permission given to the self to put hands on the helm, to think consciously, critically, responsibly, freely for the self, to exercise productive and genuine free will, to interpret and infer, decide what is genuinely best for the self, a design, and intent -- interpret and decide how one will whatever, and be able to support the interpretation and decision.
Take, for example, the apocryphal microfiction Isaac Asimov attributed to Ernest Hemingway, offhand scribbled on a napkin at a writers' gathering.
"For sale, baby shoes, never worn."
Six words, three punctuation marks, dubiously a story. Self-selection to interpret it how one will arouses denial, anger, depression, bargaining, or acceptance: Kübler-Ross grief model. Some, maybe many, stall at denial -- not a story. Some few reach a shared interpretation because they choose to accept it as a story and infer its universal intimations. The latter group cannot consider the story and its range of ramifications without persistent and identical, deep emotional responses. Self-selection.
Another several micros:
"Cruise to nowhere." From a recent vacation get-away brochure. "Never mind the scars." From a writer acquaintance. "Beware of submerged shipwrecks." From a navigation chart's legend. "Fish house liars' club." From a raconteur group's self-label. Hemingway's from a classified ad format, obviously.
Each a prompt for a thirteen-lines challenge; each great for a narrative's title.
posted
I am all for a writer developing their own set of guidelines which will assist them in the pursuit of their craft goals. Personally, I am in the process of developing what I call a Causality Map. This is an aid for me to quickly determine what Gustav Freytag calls a story's dramatic idea; most other people call it finding out what the story is really about.
My issue with walexander's 'rule of thumb' is that it is prescriptive and restrictive instead of being a method for extracting the most from narrative dialogue. Self-defined rules should enhance the self's creativity.
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posted
Several thoughts about causality, if, as they say, the exception proves the rule, or from the original legal precept "exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis: the exception confirms the rule in cases not excepted" ("Exception that proves the rule," Wikipedia), then exceptions to logical causality affirm subtler truths.
Informal fallacies are especially ripe causality exceptions for prose; for example, post or cum hoc, ergo propter hoc: after or with this, therefore because of this; ad hominem, ad nauseam, tuo quoque argumentation.
Analysis of the exceptions develops stronger appreciation of logical causality. Of several causal circumstances in quick succession, which naturally, necessarily or probably, and logically comes first and subsequents in which order? A first cause then its subsequent effects that, in turn, are causal, too. First cause A causes first effect B; causes A and B cause effect C; causes A, B, and C cause last effect D, for instance; start, middle, end. Written word is superficially linear, therefore, timing, proximity, and placement are critical.
If an individual asks the self, What am I doing? a prior, first cause is inferable if not given. Its subsequent effect then either the action of put the dress back or causality related between the two dialogue pieces, "'I'm meeting -- You know who I'm meeting." Are those simultaneous, contemporaneous, or sequential? And how to emphasize the main true idea? There, the true idea is she's not at all fine, is emotionally disequilibriated by the meet to come.
Short sentences, a nested, orderly causal sequence, and stream of consciousness disorder imitate a pressure of speech phenomena that, in turn, projects an intimation all is not fine with her. Also, the linear nature of written word and causality, deftly managed in tandem, propels dramatic movement forward logically.
Great tool -- a causality map for prose composition, works in micro sentence and paragraph level design, in macro level overall, and all fields of view between.
I'm especially fond of the optical effect known as foreshortening applied to prose: "to shorten by proportionately contracting in the direction of depth so that an illusion of projection or extension in space is obtained" (Webster's). And time and emotion projection or extension. A focal event, setting, character subject observed through a telephoto lens from a distance yet a photographic-like close-up subject in focus results in a background that is an impressionistic blur with distinguishable features. For prose, the foreshorten effect is a Post-Impressionism facet, parts in excruciatingly vivid and lively detail and parts blurred yet inferable.
The novel, not motion picture, mortuary scene of Clarice Starling from Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs is an exquisite example of narrative foreshortening. In terms of causality, the scene presents Starling a problem she wants to satisfy with tact. She draws upon her rustic experiences, projects an apt and subtle authority without appearing to assert herself in a situation where she has no authority, the scene's true subject focus. The scene's sensations are sublimely foreshortened, too, focus only on a few "telling details" and otherwise skimp background impressions. The causality mapped is linear and sublime and foreshortened by sequence and priority proximity.
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The whole post after that sentence is in question of that rule of thumb. That's why I posted it here.
It makes no sense to have an issue with a rule of thumb I myself am here questioning.
It's not even my rule of thumb.
If you have -
"I'm going to the market," she said, "so, I will see you later." This is two parts of dialog with one dialog tag. It's a basic structure for dialog. What I was trying to understand as I pointed out above was if descriptive beats can follow in the same paragraph, or if you can even add more dialog to the same paragraph. Which I have read before where a person is doing multiple different things while talking at the same time. I just wasn't sure how to apply it properly, or whether it was grammatically correct because in my head you usually break a paragraph up or restructure it if you want to add a third line a dialog or more. But that's why I'm here in the first place.
If I knew the answer I wouldn't be asking.
Just like saying something is restrictive doesn't answer the question at hand. If you haven't noticed my last three posts have been about the proper structure of paragraphs, usually where the line gets fuzzy. I can make up all the rules in my head I want, and use them how I wish, but what I need is solid answers so editors will have less work to do and my chances of being published increase. Often there is no editor to high stakes writing contests, you have to be your own editor. So I come to the forum to ask the questions that books often don't make clear or the answers are difficult to find.
posted
"I'm going to the market," she said, "so, I will see you later."
The speech part is a single complex sentence. The conjunction case "so" makes the second clause dependent, subordinate to the main clause, less emphasis than the main clause. Four parts of speech cases for "so": adverb, conjunction, adjective, pronoun. However, the comma that follows "so" is an error. The attribution tag is aptly placed.
//"I'm going to the market," she said, "so I will see you later."//
The Little, Brown Handbook, page 116, provides that a new paragraph is wanted when a new or next turn speaker speaks. Otherwise the handbook provides guidance about a paragraph's syntax, central idea, cohesion, unity, and consistency and formats, etc.
What about when one speaker changes central ideas? New paragraph wanted; however, where to place quote marks then becomes problematic. Same speaker, old paragraph, no close quote marks, new paragraph, same speaker, open marks, close marks if the conversation turn is passed or ended -- prescriptively. Passable for a dramatic monologue or soliloquy.
However, that formal composition cite method is hard for prose readers to track, having become accustomed to the new paragraph means a new speaker principle. Intervene with an internal, external sensation observation, or both, or response observation, or both, or another speaker's speech or action, etc., each aptly attributed so readers can track who is who and what is what. Actually, that method is the more natural narrative scene mode and conversation mode anyway. Long dialogue blocks or dialogue heavy narratives wear thin. When can someone else get a word in?
posted
I've personally never heard of this rule. And I'm personally of the "They're not rules, they're guidelines," school of thought, anyway.
I can easily see--and almost certainly have written--scenes in which one character is trying to say something that makes them uncomfortable in which the dialog is broken up by nervous activity on their part.
The only rule about paragraphs I'm familiar with is that they should stick to one theme or point.
Sometimes, the narrative just requires longer stretches of dialog.
posted
Consider a narrative that contains each and all dialogue methods with a range of interlaced composition modes, say, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, for study. Search keyword "said."
Each and all within that novel. One drawback is the narrative retains traditionalist scene depiction methods and melds those with and not as far along as recent modernist methods.
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“Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand.” He hung fire again. “A woman’s. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in question before she died.” They were all listening now, and of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the inference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also without irritation. “She was a most charming person, but she was ten years older than I. She was my sister’s governess,” he quietly said. “She was the most agreeable woman I’ve ever known in her position; she would have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was long before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on my coming down the second summer. I was much there that year—it was a beautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours, some strolls and talks in the garden—talks in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh yes; don’t grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me, too. If she hadn’t she wouldn’t have told me. She had never told anyone. It wasn’t simply that she said so, but that I knew she hadn’t. I was sure; I could see. You’ll easily judge why when you hear.”
So the paragraph has beats placed between the first two followed soon after by a dialog tag. Would the paragraph still been correct if the dialog tag (he quietly said.) been replaced with yet another beat. Or does a paragraph in this context require at least one dialog tag so as not to confuse the reader?
posted
Seconded -- exactly like the sample paragraph above.
"He hung fire again." Is actually a non-dialogue, non-thought, action direct discourse attribution (tag-free direct discourse), means "he" paused, sputtered like damp gunpowder once sparked within a firearm, before he continued.
A "beat" in script terms is any non-dialogue stage direction. Adapted by prose writers, the term means most anything not direct speech, or maybe direct thought. I have little appreciation for the term as per prose.
"he quietly said" is actually a beat in those terms, a stage direction for how to interpret the prior line's speech volume more so than a dialogue tag. Anymore, a Tom Swifty adverb amendment.
Any other attribution method could do instead, as is often the case. Screener and editor folk at Baen favor an "action" tag for a viable option and timely variant to a dialogue tag, and then advise an action tag best practice precedes a direct speech or thought that the tag modifies, or in short succession to a brief direct discourse portion beforehand. Nor per se are "action" or other non-tag attribution methods exclusive of attribution tags and vice versa, nor either or other attribution methods especially numerically pertinent, yet might be segment sequence pertinent.
A convention fact of prose's quotation marks is they signal this is direct speech by their selves. One principle governs, guides attribution, really, be timely, judicious, and sensibly accessible who is who and what is what such that readers' reading and comprehension are eased.
An action tag setup from The Screw, for illustration: "_He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an instant. Then as he faced us again:_ 'I can't begin. I shall have to send to town.'"
More than action, a visual sensation description of the action. ("Beats" to me are one or another indirect discourse mode, or combinations hereof, Description, Introspection, Action, Narration, Emotion, Sensation, Summarization, Exposition, Conversation, Recollection, Explanation, Transition.)
An example of a sensation interlace setup for thought and speech to follow, a weather motif foreshadow, too, adumbration's intimation actually:
"I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. _The weather had changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room, with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time before a blank sheet of paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the batter of the gusts._ Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the passage and listened a minute at Miles's door. What, under my endless obsession, I had been impelled to listen for was some betrayal of his not being at rest, and I presently caught one, but not in the form I had expected. His voice tinkled out. 'I say, you there—come in.' It was a gaiety in the gloom!"
Again, somewhat an outmoded narrative method overall: mostly shy of the later modernist evocative powers of excruciatingly vivid and lively "telling details," more summarized tell somataception sensations than detailed ones. Yet due to being public domain, a suitable model from which to copy, paste, and post however much content necessary to illustrate whatever mode or method on point.
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