Nuances of Punctuating Dialogue: Em-Dash vs Ellipsis

This is a fairly specific post about punctuating dialogue. If you're unsure on the basics of where commas and other punctuation go in relation to quotation marks, dialogue tags, and action beats, this post won't answer those questions. Sorry! Perhaps that's something I can touch on later. What I want to cover today is how two specific punctuation marks, the em-dash and the ellpisis, can change the feeling of your dialogue. If you're writing a romantic or sexy scene, this is an important distinction that can really alter a scene.

Ellipses in dialogue

An ellipsis serves many purposes. In academic writing, you probably know it as the symbol you use when you've omitted part of a quote. It can serve a similar purpose in dialogue, and it can also be used to indicate trailing off. When would an ellipsis work well in dialogue?

• When a character pauses mid-sentence and then resumes speaking, but along a different train of thought. "It's not that I don't want ... He's forgotten me by now, I'm sure."
• If a character's voice fades out or trails off at the end of their dialogue, regardless of whether they finish the thought. "You know that's not true ..."
• To indicate an elongated pause in speech. "I just wanted to say ... I love you."

Be careful not to overuse ellipses in your dialogue, though. It can make a character seem uncertain, hesitant, or reluctant. If you met someone who always ... took long pauses ... and whose voice was always trailing off ... you would probably question their confidence, at the very least. Not to mention it can make your dialogue feel painfully slow to read.

Em-dashes in dialogue

An em-dash can also be used when a character's train of thought shifts from one thing to another in dialogue, but it's a much more abrupt change. I like to think of ellipses as softer and em-dashes as harder. An em-dash in dialogue shows a sudden change in topic or a sudden end to the speech. Use it in these types of situations:

• When a character is interrupted by someone else's action or dialogue. "How could you—" She pressed a finger to my lips.
• If a character stammers or abruptly changes direction in what they're saying. "No—I mean—yes, I did kiss—but you said I should do what I wanted."
• When a character just suddenly stops speaking of their own accord. "I was only with him the one—" She closed her mouth, realizing she was only digging herself into a hole.

Again, beware of overuse. Where too many ellipses in your dialogue will feel sluggish, too many em-dashes will feel stilted and herky-jerky.

Here's a quick example of each from one of my erotic short stories, The Guest. Mateo and Gwen are married, but a flirty house guest is complicating things.

“Were you expecting David?”

“I wouldn’t have minded.” I froze the moment the words were out of my mouth. Stupid wine. “Not that I would ever—”

He silenced me with a kiss, his tongue forcing past my lips and drawing a moan from deep in my belly. “I like the way he looks at you.”

My cheeks grew hot. “He wasn’t looking at me any particular way.”

“Ah, mi preciosa... of course he was.”

How might the sentences with the ellipsis and em-dash feel different if the punctuation were reversed? How about if the punctuation was the more basic period and comma choices? When trying to convey your meaning to the reader, don't forget to consider more than just the words your characters say—look at how you punctuate those words, too.

Consent is Sexy--Dialogue, Not So Much

Every year on my Facebook page, I post an erotic short story. Just for fun. This year it took me a little longer than I would've liked to get the story written and posted. As in, I only managed to finish writing and do a quick copy/paste so that it was up at 11:59pm on New Year's Eve.

I always forget how much longer it tends to take me to write erotic scenes than I think it should. But this year there was also something else dragging it out, and I think it was the dialogue in the story. I've written previously about how much I obsess over dialogue. I pare it down as much as possible and can't stand to have more than a couple lines of it without some sort of supporting action.

This year's story was heavier on the dialogue than I like to be, generally. But I couldn't help it. The nature of the story demanded it. The story, appropriate titled Consenting Adults, focuses on explicit consent in sexual encounters. The idea struck me, but I didn't want to make it overtly political or preachy. In order to show consent as sexy, it required a lot of dialogue.

A lot of repetitious dialogue.

Lots of yes and can I and would it be okay if...

I think it took me so long to get the story written because I was just trying to avoid writing all the dialogue!

Anyway, I finally finished it an hour ago and hastily posted it to my FB page. Didn't even spell check it. Eep! I know some writers are appalled at the idea of letting anyone read the rough or first draft of anything. Obviously, I'm not one of those writers. If you'd like to read the story, you can find it here. I would love to hear from you about whether you think I made consent sexy, or anything else you'd like to comment on. I wouldn't mind a little 'like' on my page while you're there, too.

Do you ever have a "message" in your writing that you try not to make too preachy? Any tips?

And at what point do you feel okay letting people read your writing? If not the first draft, which one?

Check Me Out!

Recently, author Cheri Lasota and I swapped guest blog posts.  You can see my guest post on her blog here - it's everything you ever wanted to know about writing dialogue!

Art Imitating Life

I realized something the other day about my writing style and my real-life social preferences. Turns out, the same things I dislike about dialogue in writing are the same things I dislike when interacting with people: 

• Small talk and meaningless words.  I never really understood the point.  Some people are just uncomfortable with silence.  Sometimes characters are too.  If that's the case, and a character rambling on and on about nonsense is part of their personality, that's brilliant.  But just to fill space, it's no excuse.
• Sometimes you can get a sense that someone is saying something to you to get a certain reaction, for their own benefit - whether it’s fishing for a compliment, or making vague comments in the hope that you’ll ask questions and allow them to talk some more about their topic of choice. I equate this to dialogue that is rife with the author’s agenda instead of sounding true to the moment.
• Taking twenty minutes to tell me a five minute story.  Get to the point, already!  Better yet, don't tell me the story at all.  If it were that important, you'd spit it out faster.  In dialogue, this is using 45 words where 10 would suffice.  Again, if something is important enough to say in dialogue, you should find the most precise words to say it.

You could argue that this is actually a case of life imitating art - that I'm so entrenched in my writerly mind it's rubbing off on my real life.  But anyone who knows me - especially if they've known me a while - knows I've always been this way.  I was the girl in the middle of a crowded, noisy room, who could tune it all out and take it all in at the same time.  Listening, I feel, is infinitely more valuable than speaking.

 

Snazzy Dialogue III: Using Dialogue to Differentiate Characters

Oh my gosh, it's been ages since I had a Snazzy Dialogue post!  I'll try to do better, I promise.  If you haven't make sure you read Part I, and Part II. Here's the next installment, and I hope it makes up for the huge amount of time I've been absent from the blog.

As I’m embarking on new writing projects and editing older ones, I continue to scrutinize my dialogue. The main characters in my current projects are very different women, and they all have different ways of speaking, which brought me to this current post about using dialogue to differentiate characters.

In my critique group, an old member had a few characters who were very similar in terms of race, class, socioeconomic background, education, etc. She was struggling with how to differentiate them, how to make each one unique from the other. One possible way, I think, is through dialogue.

One way to do this is through the content of the character’s dialogue, and using that to express the different personalities, desires, and goals of the characters. For example, having a character simply saying the things that make them different from other characters. However, you can run into the problems of using dialogue too much for exposition, and also being too obvious with the dialogue. What I want to discuss today is the more subtle way to differentiate characters simply by their manner of speaking.

For example, I have two characters in To Call Home who are similar in many ways. Charlotte and Lora are the same age, grew up together in the same town, both white females, similar socioeconomic standings, etc. But you can see the differences when they speak to each other. Charlotte has a tendency to avoid difficult questions through silence or circumlocution. Lora gets straight to the point, asking lots of questions and giving blunt answers. Here’s a small excerpt of an argument between the two girls.

Lora put a hand on her shoulder. “What’s going on with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re freaking me out a little bit. I’m sorry if it makes me sound like a jerk, but you weren’t even this…crazy—” (she winced when she said it) “—right after your mom died. What’s going on now?”

Charlotte shrugged, exaggerating the movement of her shoulders and slumping her chin to her chest.

“I don’t know what I should tell you. What I can tell you.”

“It’s fucking me you’re talking to,” Lora whispered. “That shouldn’t even be a question in your mind.”

But it was. She couldn’t help it.

“I don’t have anything useful to say right now. I just don’t even know what words should be coming out of my mouth. But please don’t leave right now, okay? Please?”

The content of the dialogue isn’t as important as the manner in which the girls speak to each other. You can see Lora’s dominating personality in the way she asks questions plainly, and doesn’t hesitate to potentially insult her friend by calling her crazy. Charlotte, on the other hand, can’t give a simple answer to anything at this point. She talks a lot here, but doesn’t actually answer Lora’s questions. These two interact like this a lot, no matter what they’re talking about. And it’s much more interesting to see the conversations and relationships develop this way, instead of having Charlotte and Lora say the exact feelings behind the dialogue, which would read something like this:

“You were really depressed and confused after your mom died, but that was three and a half years ago. Why are you still being so immature and evasive?” Lora asked.

Charlotte stared at her. “Because I think I’ve fallen in love with Steven, who you don’t know is our new English teacher. Sorry I didn’t tell you about that sooner.”

“Your summer fling is our new teacher? Crazy! But what’s so bad about falling in love?”

“Since my dad was a rat bastard, I have it ingrained in my subconscious that all men will eventually hurt me.”

“Oh. Makes sense.”

Yeah, not very interesting. Maybe a little funny, but that’s not what we’re going for. We want subtlety.

Very briefly, since this post is getting quite long, I’ll mention a couple other things that go along with differentiating characters through dialogue. You can use speech impediments or catch phrases to make characters unique. You can use a style of speech - more formal, a lot of vernacular, etc. Charlotte doesn’t hesitate to say things like “Jesus!” or “Christ!” But there are other characters who wouldn’t say that. I know a lady from work who always says “How ’bout it?” in her thin, gravelly voice. It makes me laugh. It would make for a great catch phrase for just the right character. These are all just little ways we can use dialogue to add further depth and dimension to our characters.

Check! Well.....almost

I'm working on my list, trying to check a few things off. I'm almost there with at least one, but not quite. The query is beginning to shape up, and it' hasn't been as horrible a process as I'd feared. Don't get me wrong, it totally sucks, but it's not as painful as I thought. :-) I've gotten some writing done, and I'm getting closer to the end. But there's still plenty more to go. And I'm starting to freak about my word count now.... It's really getting up there.

But let's see, what else? Erotica short story? Submitting to a magazine? Nope, nothing there yet. Haven't heard back yet, either. The novel's been taking up all my time, I haven't even given any thought to the short stories just yet. A Snazzy Dialogue post? Not there yet, either. I'm frustrated with dialogue right now (I feel like a lot of what I'm currently writing is too dialogue-heavy and is a little lacking in other good stuff) so maybe that's why. But I've got a month to get it all done.

One month and counting.

Snazzy Dialogue II: Dialogue Tags

(Read Part I here)

Before I get into the main part of this post, I wanted to mention an only-slightly-related dialogue issue. Literary Agent Nathan Bransford had a contest for Preposterously Magnificent Dialogue on his blog. For the hell of it, I entered. (Wasn't a finalist, and now that I think of it I don't think I selected my strongest bit of dialogue.) You could submit up to 250 words of dialogue and the intermittent action. Obviously, I wanted something with more dialogue than not, since it was a dialogue contest. So I went searching through Charlotte to see what bits of dialogue I liked enough that I would pick from for my entry.


It was then that I realized that I have quite a bit of intermittent/supporting action. It's not too often that I have more than three lines of dialogue without some action in between. And really, my dialogue, while not necessarily scarce, is fairly limited. And much of what's said in dialogue is directly related to the intermittent action in such a way that the dialogue may be misunderstood or not have the same impact should the action be pared down or cut. Is this good? Bad? Or is it just.... the way it is? I'm not sure. But I've decided for now that it's good, at least for me. If you think about it, in our real conversations, how much importance do you give to what is actually said compared to the tone of voice in which it's said, or the hand gestures and facial expressions of the person saying it? It's all pretty closely intertwined and can say a lot more than the words themselves.


But on to the main post topic of dialogue tags. My above tangent really is related because I'm going to suggest that instead of the usual dialogue tags (he said, she said, he asked, told, yelled, etc.) you can use some bit of action instead. If you write "It's freezing in here." Johnny hugged himself and rubbed his hands over his arms. then we'll know that it was Johnny who said it's freezing. It can get really repetitive reading "said" all the time. And it's not necessarily better to use every alternative to it, either. Commanded, growled, purred, shouted, uttered, announced, exclaimed, cried, replied, disclosed, mumbled, stated...... Really, by trying to come up with a clever synonym for "said" EVERY time you use a dialogue tag, you just end up making your writing appear immature and not very clever. ALSO, please try to avoid this:

"Give it to me now," he said angrily.
"But it's mine!" she shouted loudly. "You can't have it!"

Adverbs are NEVER the answer. You're telling the reader everything and showing them nothing. (yeah, that old adage....) Now I know I've probably broken this rule of mine far too many times to count. That doesn't mean it was good. And you definitely shouldn't do it. There are instances where a nicely placed adverb can be brilliant, but don't overdo it.

In addition to avoiding repetition and giving you a way to show rather than tell, action can do a lot for your scene in tandem with your dialogue. It can potentially change the meaning of the words. It can alter the mood of the scene, the pacing, it can ease or create tension. Let's look at the following exchange between Charlotte and Steven the morning after they're passionately reunited :

“I have bacon?” he asked.
“No. Your refrigerator was pathetic. I had to steal your car and a twenty from your wallet so I could make breakfast,” she said.
“And just how do you plan on paying me back?” he asked mischievously.
“The bacon’s going to burn,” she said when he unbuttoned her pants.
“Let it.”
“We’ve got all day for that,” she said, grinning.
“All day?” he asked.
“Well, most of it. My plane doesn’t leave until six.”
“Stay,” he implored her.
“Steven, I can’t,” she insisted.
“I know. But I had to ask anyway.”
“I’m glad you want me to, though,” she said. “Now put a shirt on and sit down. Breakfast is almost ready.”

Eh. It's just okay. Nothing spectacular. All dialogue. No pacing. Not much on the descriptive or emotional side. There's no action from either character to help us understand how they each feel during this scene. Not to mention it sucks to read "he said," "she insisted," "she said" every other sentence. Let's see what some supporting action can do for us:

“I have bacon?” he asked, coming up behind her.
“No. Your refrigerator was pathetic. I had to steal your car and a twenty from your wallet so I could make breakfast.”
“And just how do you plan on paying me back?” He put his arms around her waist and kissed the back of her neck. Her hair was still damp from the shower and he could smell his shampoo, his soap. She still wore his T-shirt, though she’d put on her own jeans. She’d never been more sexy.
“The bacon’s going to burn,” she said when he unbuttoned her pants.
“Let it.”
She squealed as he slid his hand down between her legs, but she managed to wriggle out of his arms.
“We’ve got all day for that,” she said, grinning.
“All day?”
She looked away, turned back to the stove. “Well, most of it. My plane doesn’t leave until six.”
“Stay.” They’d just found their way back to each other and she was leaving already.
“Steven, I can’t.”
“I know. But I had to ask anyway.”
“I’m glad you want me to, though.” She turned around and kissed him. “Now put a shirt on and sit down. Breakfast is almost ready.”

Not to toot my own horn (well okay, maybe a little) but I think the second version is much better. (This isn't what I submitted for Nathan's contest, BTW, but I think this would've been better than what I did submit.) When Steven puts his arms around Charlotte and reacts to the scent of her, we can sense the sexual tension. And then it's not nearly so shocking when he puts his hand down her pants! And the fact that she "squeals" shows her playfulness and willingness to participate. Otherwise the scene could come across as super creepy. There's some tension of the non-sexual variety when she turns away from him before mentioning her plane leaving at six. So now we know that she's leaving, and that seems sad because they appear to be having fun. This min-scene ends hopefully, though, when she turns around and kisses him.

And thus ends this very long post. :-)

Read Part III here.

Snazzy Dialogue I: Catch-22

I was recently complimented on the dialogue in the opening chapter of my novel. I was stunned! Dialogue is a big deal for me. I fret over it all the time. But I'm apparently doing something right! So I thought I'd compile some of the things I keep in mind when writing dialogue.

"Hey bro. What's up?"
"Nothing really. You?"
"You know. More of the same."
"Yeah dude. I know."

Not terribly exciting, is it? But I bet you've had - or overheard - this very conversation, dozens of times. That doesn't mean you need to write it in your story.

Dialogue needs to be meaningful. It needs to be real. But it can't be real. Get my drift? I don't care how many times you scream "But I've heard dozens of people talk like that!" Just because people have long conversations about their bowel movements or their cousin's husband's predilection for online porn, doesn't mean your characters should.

Dialogue should tell us something about the character speaking it. It should illuminate the situation. It should create tension or assuage it, clarify a problem or confuse it, whatever the goal of the scene-at-large, the dialogue should work in tandem with the rest.

Throw in something unexpected. Have a character lie. Have them be painfully honest. Have them misunderstand what another character says and respond accordingly. Don't be boring!

Let's think about that and revisit the above conversation:

"Hey bro. What's up?"
"Cut the shit. How much you need to borrow this time?"
"Dude, a grand should cover me. Blackjack table got me this time."
"Yeah, more of the same."

See? At least now we know a little bit about what's going on. We can see distinct personalities int he speakers. There's connotation to the remark "more of the same."

Now get out there and write some great dialogue!

Read Part II here.