Learning tags and how to write them - Part three

Learning tags and how to write them - Part three

A Lesson by Yhoretta
"

Interrupting and continuing.

"


Feel free to skip anything you already know. Characters interrupting each other comes down to a simple matter of hyphon placement (which is, for those who may not know, this: - ). Let's look at the example:

Jess placed a comforting hand on Ben's shoulder. 'I think that can w-'

'It has to be now, Jess!' He shrugged her off irritably.

In this, the character, Jess, has been interrupted by the other, Ben. If you remove the hyphon of the first dialogue line, people will think you've simply made a typo. A variation of this technique is to have a character trail off.

'I think that can wait.' Jess paused, gauging his reaction.

Ben sighed. 'Yeah...'

Now, let's say we want Ben and Jess to have actions in the middle of their conversation. There are two main ways to do this. I'll showcase both below:

'I think we should go on a vacation,' Jess turned to face Ben, 'don't you?'

'I think we need it.' Ben nodded. 'Let's go!'

Jess is speaking in one sentence, so like we learned with dialogue tags, we have commas to show that the sentence continues through her action. Ben, however speaks in two seperate sentences, so we have periods/full stops in place to show that there's a pause.

In the final lesson, I'll go over some common misspellings of words that are often see in everyday dialogue. :)

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Author

Yhoretta
Yhoretta

New Zealand



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I'm just an author who does what she does for the love of doing what she does...and also speaking about herself in the third person; that's important.