Each week I provide a few creative writing tips in the form of a mini writing workshop. Until now this regular writing workshop has been included in my weekly 50-word challenge post. But as I announced in last week's post I'm changing things up. The 50-word challenge is now a weekly contest. And the mini writing workshop will be its own weekly post. So... here we go with today's topic, which is about writing dialog.
Creative writing can be fun, challenging, annoying and difficult. I've spent a good part of a lifetime dabbling in it, studying it, teaching it, and never feeling quite sure I've cracked the code.
But I have helped quite a few people to improve their writing, and that's the purpose of this little workshop. I love to see that ah-ha when writers understand some of the mechanical things they do that impact the quality of their writing.
When you write dialog in a story, it's important to make sure your reader knows who is speaking.
One way is to use dialog tags, like this:
"I'd like the chocolate pie," Rebecca said.
There are a few problems with this method. One is that it's incredibly distracting. If we have to read "he said" or "she said," or "said so-and-so" every time someone speaks, it is very difficult to immerse into the story. Another problem is that it sounds clunky and repetitive. And finally, in very short micro-fiction such as a 50-word short story, you simply cannot afford it. Every word counts, and you want to use all of the words available to you for setting, action and dialog.
The good news is that there is a better way. It just takes a little practice. All you do is provide a detail about the character who is speaking. It could be something about that person's appearance, a gesture, or a detail that helps us see where in the scene that person is. This information indicates who the subject of the paragraph is. When that person speaks, the reader knows exactly who is talking.
Here is an example:
The clerk stood behind the counter, waiting. She cleared her throat and clicked her pen. "May I help you?" Rebecca looked around. Perhaps she was making someone else wait. But there was no one there. "I'm sorry. I need a moment to decide." "Take your sweet time." Perhaps the clerk had other things to do. Rebecca placed her hand on the glass display case. It felt cool. "Okay. Sorry. I would like the chocolate pie." "Would that be a slice or were you wanting the whole pie?" The clerk said this in a tone that indicated she was no mind reader.
So, as you can see, we have an opportunity to intersperse dialog with action in a way that involves the reader in the story. If the information about what Rebecca is doing and thinking is on the same line as something she says, we intuitively understand that she is the one speaking.
We don't need to use this device for every single thing that is said. We understand, when there is a paragraph break and another quote, that it is the other person in the scene. If you have three or more people in the scene, then you simply need to add more indicators of who is speaking. I hope that helps!
I wrote a 50-word story for the contest prompt, intending to use it as an example in this weekly workshop post. You can read it here: A fork in the road.
Somehow, WordPress (where I write all of my substantive blog posts) published the story to my blog five times! Thanks to the astute observational powers of 
I decided to keep one version of the short story (the decision was easy; I chose the one that had a comment from a friend) and write new content to replace four of the posts. So, I wrote three additional 50-word short stories (The bells, Sweet chaos, and White coral bells), all on the prompt theme of "bells." For the fifth repeat I wrote this post. So, it has been a wild few hours, but the damage is repaired. However, in the process I became really sick of that initial story as well as anything whatsoever having to do with bells. So I came up with a new example for this workshop.
If you saw all that crazy stuff going on, or got repeat notices in Gina or Steemify about my short story's doppelganger's, I apologize for the confusion!
Thank you for reading!
