Hi, this is Val Campbell, and I am so excited to be here and share with you the fifth video in this series called How to Write. This one is a challenge for me because it is the most difficult part of writing for yours truly, and that is dialogue. Now, the actual creating of the dialogue and the relationship stuff between my characters is the easiest part of writing for me. The most difficult is punctuating the dialogue because I was kind of obsessed with wanting to be accurate.
Now, I got to tell you that there's something called the Chicago Manual of Style. I never knew—who knew there's a Chicago Manual of Style? I've been to Chicago. Why do they get to have the manual of style?, apparently, maybe a lot of publishing houses were in New York and Chicago or something. I don't know, but it's called the Chicago Manual of Style, and it's the rule of thumb for all things writing.
Well, here's the problem: We don't always write how we talk, and trying to figure out how to punctuate it properly, to me, was a real challenge. I'm going to give you a link to a pretty outstanding series of videos by the author of those videos at the bottom here, who I think teaches a lot of this really well. But even so, I really struggled with this, and I spent a lot of time going back and forth, trying to figure out, "What do they do here? Where do I put a period? Where do I put a comma? How do I capitalize this?"
So, I decided that I'm going to take you through this real quick, there are professional editors who are going to read this post and vomit on their shoes and call me all kinds of names because I'm probably telling you the wrong thing. I came up with because I went and dug through my library, pulled out novel after novel, and looked at everything. And there was a variety of different ways that this was handled—sometimes even within a given page, there would be a couple of different ways. And I thought, Geez, how am I supposed to know this?
I don't think it makes that much difference. Just try to be fairly consistent with what you're doing. That's my advice here. So, let's go through this. All right, I'm going to do a screen share, and I've prepared something again, just like I did in previous lesson, and you can look at this.
Now, here's the deal
You were with me in the last post, Lesson four, where I talked about using Word and Grammarly, and we went through and edited this and created and edited. So now, I'm just going to come in and add some dialogue and we're going to play with this a little bit.
"What do you think we should do?" he asked her.
, punctuation goes inside the quotation marks, right? I didn't know this—this is how basic I was when I got started. I had to learn this and figure it out. Well, the first time I did it the other way, I went, Oh, that doesn't look right, so I changed it. That's a point: If you do something and it just doesn't—if you're a reader, right?—and it just doesn't look right to you, then go ahead and change it.
Right here, this lowercase doesn't quite look right to me. It probably would be okay, so I'm going to change it:
This is a question mark, right?
"What do you think we should do?" Close quotation. He asked her. Right?
She thought for a minute. Comma—uh, it's a good idea to put a comma when you're introducing dialogue. Okay, comma: "I think we should make more posts about punctuating dialogue."
Next line—when you're changing characters speaking, changing dialogue by characters, introduce a new line. Even if there's, a couple of words, change the line. Couple of words, change the line. Couple of words, change the line. That's fine.
You want to be really careful about introducing dialogue from multiple characters in the same paragraph. Okay, this is a paragraph change. You see this over here
this paragraph change designation. The reason is because it can pretty quickly get confusing on who's saying what if you're doing that. This is how you split it up for the convenience of your reader.
"Oh, for the love of God, can't you think of anything more boring?" Close quotation.
Now, you see, it tells me that I need a comma there. Oh, comma:
"Oh, for the love of God, can't you think of anything more boring?"
He stopped what he was doing and looked at her sadly. Comma again—comma, new quotation mark:
"I think you will put the reviewers—or put the viewers—to sleep!" Exclamation mark.
Okay, I'm being funny here, but you get the point. Now, somebody's going to look at this and say, Gee, you should capitalize this or should not capitalize that. I don't think it's going to make a huge amount of difference. Here's why I say this: I was obsessed with this. I just needed to figure this out. This is part of my personality—what was the right thing to do?
I went out to 10 beta readers with various, sometimes, 15, 18 chapters written. Not one of those beta readers came back and complained about punctuation in dialogue. Not one. What they did was they came back and said:
"Gee, the sex scenes are too graphic. When's your next novel going to be done? I can't wait."
Or:
"When can you send me the next chapters? I'm so excited to read them." Right?
Or:
"Gee, that was kind of too violent for me. When's the next chapter going to be out? Because I really want to read it."
Or:
"I can't wait to get to see your next book. This is going to be really exciting, so be sure to give me a copy when you're writing it."
You know, that type of thing. So that became my joke that even the people that didn't like it loved it. People are going to have different things about your book that they're going to like or not like, okay, based on their personal experience and personality.
I actually had one of my beta readers say:
"I have to set the book aside because it brought up too many powerful negative memories for her—some personal experience."
And we'll—she and I are going to discuss that at a later time. But I guess that's what you're looking for—you're looking to have that kind of reaction, right? And I talk about that in some of the other blogs.
But as you're going through and as you're creating dialogue, you're going to be the one that's going to need to decide if you like that dialogue or not. That's different from the way you punctuate it. What I found is that I would just go, write it, blow it in there, get it there, then come back and start working on your punctuation. And I do it by: Do I like the looks of it? Does it feel good to me as I'm writing it?
As I'm reading it, and then as I come back afterwards a few hours or the next day and read through it again—because I'm frequently doing this as I'm writing—I will write a couple of chapters, then I will go back and forth with Grammarly, fixing things up, cleaning it up. Then I come back the next day, and I read what I wrote before, and I'm there. I'm looking for continuity and feel. I'm reading it more as if I'm enjoying the reading, and it's surprising how many times I will come back and look at something and say:
"You know, I had that character do something that now I feel like it's a little bit out of character. Maybe I was caught up in the passion of the moment or something like that."
Or maybe I wanted more. Maybe I looked at Reddit and thought, You know, that doesn't really go far enough.
I'll give you an example that I use when I'm talking to people about this. I like details, and I like kind of reality—the whole experience in what I'm reading. And I get frustrated when an author says:
"John and Mary kissed passionately and let the night take them—let their passion at night take them into the morning."
And I'm like, What? You know, I mean, I want details. I want some—I want some sex, and I want some love, and I want to know what these two experienced as they combined their souls. You know?
And this whole idea of—you know, just leaving you hanging to fill in everything on your own—neither do I think, as a writer, we need to provide every detail to our readers. But for me personally, I want to have more. I want to know what they're experiencing and what they feel as they're going through this experience. Right?
Sorry, I used the word so many times, but—so there's a balance there, and you have to seek that balance and find it in your own writing. But I just find that as I come back—and it usually takes me about five different readings before I get everything to the point that I like—and I do that in succession. I just don't stop and do one and then do it over and over again. I create more. I go back the next day and start reading, and it's kind of progressions as I'm going through my work.
And this allows me some time to digest what I'm doing, and it allows the character to develop. I might have felt a little bit differently about the character—about the subject—early on than I do as the character fleshes out his or her personality. Sometimes the character becomes a different person, and now I go back and look at this and think:
"You know, that person wouldn't have done that or wouldn't have said that."
Or perhaps I put something down that I later feel is more—maybe a little bit too crass. You know, you get the point. But unless—until you let that piece of writing sit and mellow, you're not going to know exactly how to do this.
And that comes over into punctuating dialogue and creating dialogue. And I find that more than any other place, that's where the issues come in with something being out of character because that's something your character is saying. It's not your narrative coming in there.
Now, by the way, this is probably as good a place as any—and I should have talked about this earlier. When I first started writing Operation Austin, I was writing in first person, and I just sat down and started writing. And what I found—I got about 15 chapters in, and it didn't work anymore. I had split scenes into different cities and then brought things back together, and all of a sudden, I could not make a transition back into first person with that person being in the scene in a different place.
I just couldn't figure out how to do it. I didn't like some of the techniques that normally are used to do that—where it might have the person's name and then you're hearing, you know, how they are, and then the next person's name and you're hearing from their perspective. I didn't like how it played through the book.
So, if you're going to write a short story, first person is probably fine because that's basically a chapter. But if you're going to write a novel, I would suggest developing it from the start in third person. It is going to make it so much easier. I probably would have saved myself two or three weeks of editing and review and rewrites if I'd done that from the start.
The next thing is: Be sure and back up your work. In fact, I'm so anal, I back up in two different outside places. I have my copy that I keep on my hard drive and my computer. I've got an external hard drive that I use to back up, and I've got a little thumb drive—where is it? Here, I'll reach forward and grab it, it's basically like this. I've got a little thumb drive that I keep my current backup in.
I know of someone who spent a year writing—and in this particular case, was interviewing elderly people about their life experiences and pulling this into a book about the experiences of these older people who were in their 80s and 90s when they were growing up—how were things different, what did they experience. That person wrote for a year, collected all of these interviews, and they lost all of it. There was some kind of event where they lost everything on their hard drive. Some of those people had passed away. There was no backup. I mean, it's a disaster.
I'll never forget that story. I heard that story probably 40 years ago—30 years ago when I was in college, and I never forgot that. I thought, Oh my Lord, think about the wealth of that information that was lost.
Your work is like this. Your work is precious. It's a story that the public needs to hear, and you need to protect it by making sure that you've got backups. Okay?
So, that's pretty much it for today. I hope that this helps. If you have any questions on this subject, if you want to tell me I'm crazy for the way I look at punctuation, that's fine. Come and tell me. You can find me in comment secrion of this blog. Or my website, Leave me messages. Cuss at me, swear at me—I don't care. Just as long as you're engaged, right?
All right, this is Val Campbell. Keep writing.
vscampbell.com