How to Write Dialogue Without Muddling Up Things

There are only a few ways to format dialogue in fiction. Anyone with an elementary school education knows how. The English standard has been in place for centuries. If you’ve read a novel you’ve no doubt figured this out. It’s not complicated.

Most writers use this conventional format: Each turn in dialogue starts a paragraph, and the speech is enclosed in quotes. A dialogue tag is sometimes used to identify the speaker. For example:

“Always use quotes to enclose spoken dialogue,” Jeff said.

Pretty straightforward, and difficult to get wrong.

Let’s look at an example from a famous writer. Here’s one from My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse:

“Jeeves, we want your advice.”

“Very good, sir.”

I boiled down Corky’s painful case into a few well-chosen words.

“So you see what it amounts to, Jeeves. We want you to suggest some way by which Mr. Worple can make Miss Singer’s acquaintance without getting on to the fact that Mr. Corcoran already knows her. Understand?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

“Well, try to think of something.”

“I have thought of something already, sir.”

“You have!”

“The scheme I would suggest cannot fail of success, but it has what may seem to you a drawback, sir, in that it requires a certain financial outlay.”

“He means,” I translated to Corky, “that he has got a pippin of an idea, but it’s going to cost a bit.”

Here’s another dialogue example from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens):

“Now,” says Ben Rogers, “what’s the line of business of this Gang?”

“Nothing only robbery and murder,” Tom said.

“But who are we going to rob?—houses, or cattle, or—”

“Stuff! Stealing cattle and such things ain’t robbery; it’s burglary,” says Tom Sawyer. “We ain’t burglars. That ain’t no sort of style. We are highwaymen. We stop stages and carriages on the road, with masks on, and kill the people and take their watches and money.”

“Must we always kill the people?”

“Oh, certainly. It’s best. Some authorities think different, but mostly it’s considered best to kill them—except some that you bring to the cave here, and keep them till they’re ransomed.”

“Ransomed? What’s that?”

“I don’t know. But that’s what they do. I’ve seen it in books; and so of course that’s what we’ve got to do.”

“But how can we do it if we don’t know what it is?”

“Why, blame it all, we’ve got to do it. Don’t I tell you it’s in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up?”

Despite Tom Sawyer’s sage advice, there are always some writers who do things differently.

Cormac McCarthy is one such writer. Although McCarthy breaks and indents dialogue for different speakers, he doesn’t use quotes. In fact, he tries to limit punctuation in his novels to periods, capital letters, and occasional commas. That’s it. It’s a remarkably clean and uncluttered style.

Here’s a tense scene from No Country for Old Men, one of McCarthy’s most famous novels:

Will there be something else? the man said.

I don’t know. Will there?

Is there something wrong?

With what?

With anything?

Is that what you’re asking me? Is there something wrong with anything?

The man turned away and put his fist to his mouth and coughed again. He looked at Chigurh and he looked away. He looked out the window at the front of the store. The gas pumps and the car sitting there. Chigurh ate another small handful of the cashews.

Will there be anything else?

You’ve already asked me that.

Well I need to see about closin.

See about closin.

Yessir.

What time do you close?

Now. We close now.

McCarthy is one of the most efficient writers when it comes to dialogue tags. Notice that there’s only one dialogue tag in that previous passage: “the man said” at the end of the first line. And that’s all that’s needed. You can tell who’s speaking from the context.

Some writers (James Joyce, William Gaddis, Alan Paton, Irvine Welsh, and Charles Frazier) avoid quotes and use a dash at the start of a line of dialogue. (McCarthy was also fond of this style at the start of his career, but he abandoned the dashes in his later novels.) The quotation dash style is common in several other languages (Bulgarian, French, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese), so it’s not so unusual to employ it in English. It’s just a matter of style.

Here’s an example of fiction that uses dashes to indicate dialogue from Gaddis’s celebrated novel J R.:

—Money…? in a voice that rustled.

—Paper, yes.

—And we’d never seen it. Paper money.

—We never saw paper money till we came east.

—It looked so strange the first time we saw it. Lifeless.

—You couldn’t believe it was worth a thing.

—Not after Father jingling his change.

—Those were silver dollars.

—And silver halves, yes and quarters, Julia. The ones from his pupils. I can hear him now…

Notice there are no dialogue tags in that passage. Who’s speaking? It’s difficult to tell. One of the people is addressed as Julia, so we know her name, but not the other speaker’s name. It’s a mysterious passage. We need more context to know what’s going on. If you read on, perhaps you can figure out who said what. But you may need to flip pages back to fully understand it. Unlike a movie, we can’t see who’s speaking, so readers must be more actively engaged to read dialogue formatted this way.

Writers who format dialogue this way demand that readers be more actively engaged. It’s the price of admission to their work. Not all writers can get away with that.

Who’s the writer with the most iconoclastic style of dialogue?

It’s gotta be José Saramago. In Saramago’s novels, he doesn’t start each turn of dialogue with a new paragraph and he doesn’t use quotation marks. Everything runs together in the narrative.

At first glance, Saramago’s combination of narrative and dialogue appears to be a jumbled mess. Here’s a sample from the first paragraph of Saramago’s novel Seeing:

Terrible voting weather, remarked the presiding officer of polling station fourteen as he snapped shut his soaked umbrella and took off the raincoat that had proved of little use to him during the breathless forty-meter dash from the place where he had parked his car to the door through which, heart pounding, he had just appeared. I hope I’m not the last, he said to the secretary, who was standing slightly away from the door, safe from the sheets of rain which, caught by the wind, were drenching the floor. Your deputy hasn’t arrived yet, but we’ve still got plenty of time, said the secretary soothingly. With rain like this, it’ll be a feat in itself if we all manage to get here, said the presiding officer as they went into the room where the voting would take place. He greeted, first, the poll clerks who would act as scrutineers and then the party representatives and their deputies. He was careful to address exactly the same words to all of them, not allowing his face or tone of voice to betray any political and ideological leanings of his own. A presiding officer, even of an ordinary polling station like this, should, in all circumstances, be guided by the strictest sense of independence, he should, in short, always observe decorum.

Such a dense paragraph, with several lines of dialogue included without any line breaks or quotation marks. At least there are dialogue tags to identify the speakers.

Why would anyone choose to write like that? Perhaps there’s another modern writer who writes dialogue in this style, but I’m not aware of one. Saramago, a Nobel Prize-winning writer, was on his own.

Be patient and read that entire Saramago passage. You’ll find that it’s not chaotic or sloppy or difficult to read. In fact, it reads like a well-crafted prose poem.

Although Saramago’s narrative style of dialogue results in occasional ambiguity, you can intuitively sense his objective after reading his prose for just a few minutes. His prose has a beautiful rhythm, and it seems designed to be read aloud.

Only a master prose stylist (assisted by able translators) can pull off narrative dialogue as fluidly as Saramago.

If your prose isn’t quite as elegant as Saramago’s, follow Tom Sawyer’s advice and stick with the conventional dialogue style. After all, you don’t want to get things all muddled up.

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For some excellent tips on writing and punctuating dialogue, see the following sites:

• The Editor’s Blog: Punctuation in Dialogue
• Author Learning Center: 8 Essential Rules for Punctuating Dialogue
• Self-Publishing School: How to Write Dialogue: A Master List of Grammar & Techniques