Jewell…I just line edited a 160,000-word novel that was punctuated like that. Yes, it drove me insane. I couldn’t read a book like that for pleasure!

But I once read a book where this is how the author dealt with dialogue tags. Drove me apeshit.

“I hate when you say something’s against the rules,” Maya slipped off an orange Nike. “There are no rules,” she chucked the shoe at Shannon’s head.

:::clutches heart:::

Such a no-no!

I guess, since I haven’t noticed that, is that it’s okay if it’s DONE WELL. Maybe the passages have been sticking out to me because they weren’t done as well.

And I learned to type with 2 spaces after a period, too. Took me a couple of books, but it’s doable.

I still try to remember to check before I submit, though, because when I’m tired or really in the zone, I’ll regress.

What rule? I’ve never heard of such a thing. I like the fourth example. As long as we understand who’s saying/doing what, and there aren’t two speakers in the same paragraph, I don’t see a problem.

Because dialogue tags aren’t only about speaker attribution, they’re also about incorporating action into the dialogue. Why couldn’t Maya say something, take off her shoe, then hang onto it for a moment while she said something else before chucking it at Shan? I mean, people alternate speech with action all the time, right?

Or is what’s bugging you the staccato feel to the passage? In which case, I’d probably merge the last three sentences to indicate she was talking and chucking at the same time. Or something.

Hey, I’m all about variety. Using the same dialogue structure — no matter what it is — throughout a book is eventually going to annoy the reader.

But then, I also will — horror of horrors — sometimes let two characters share one dialogue exchange in a single paragraph, if that suits the flow of the moment. It’s all about the rhythm of the passage, both in how it looks on the page and how it sounds in my ear as I read it back. If it works, it works. Period.

Speaking of which — Annemarie and Lisa J, I learned how to type in 1964. So you might say the two period thing was pretty ingrained. Retrained myself to the one period method IN ONE MANUSCRIPT a year or so ago. So it can be done.

I’m with Annmarie, we cannot deal with the dialogue issue until the world goes back to two spaces.

As to the other, I can’t address that until we resolve this one space after a period thing.

Writing is evolving, though. Multiple breaks in dialogue to deliver stage directions are symptomatic of TV and movie viewing. Actions in film or the small screen often do convey meaning to viewers due to the body language cues given off by the actors.

Now the visio-aural “scripting” from TV and movies has bled over onto the page, where in the past, writing was confined to graphical representation of ideas, using metaphor and allegory to convey plot, character and emotion, and to illicit emotion from the reader.

Only very rarely do I find any real meaning derived from these stage direction dialogue tags. Is this writing evolution a bad thing? Who knows. But I do know one thing:

Unexpected interruptions in dialogue = print convention ignored = visual noise = reader has to work harder to derive meaning from text = broken immersion = reader has an excuse to put the book down and never pick it up (or open the file) again.