Dialogue is an essential part of creative writing and can easily make or break your work. However, realistic and engaging dialogue is difficult to write. To make matters worse, it has its own set of punctuation rules, which can feel unintuitive at first. Here is a quick-and-dirty cheat sheet to get you on the right path, with examples to help illustrate some of the unfamiliar terms and practices.
The Basics
First things first: put all lines of dialogue in double quotes to indicate that these are spoken words. To signal a change in speaker, put each character’s dialogue on a new line. Even at this most basic level, readers will understand that this is an exchange between characters.
“I love you.”
“I know.”
Dialogue Tags
Dialogue tags, also known as “attributions,” are the “he said, she said” of written conversation. When used, they clarify who’s speaking and sometimes provide additional information. They can go before, after, or right in the middle of dialogue lines, depending on how you’d like to create your rhythm and flow. (Or you can even skip them altogether! But that’s another post for another day.) Regardless of the tag’s placement, always use a comma in place of a period between the tag and the line of dialogue.
If the tag follows the dialogue, the first letter of the tag is not capitalized.
“I’m never going to give you up,” he said.
If the tag goes before the dialogue, capitalize the first letter of the dialogue.
She smiled and added, “Never gonna let you down.”
Of course, always capitalize names, even if they immediately follow a dialogue tag.
“Never gonna run around and desert you,” Ricky Astley sang at the top of his lungs.
What if you don’t want to put the tag before or after the dialogue, but right smack in the middle? You can do that too! These are still punctuated with commas, and the beginning of the second section of dialogue is left uncapitalized.
“Houston,” the astronaut said, his voice oddly steady, “we have a problem.”
If you wish to make a more pronounced pause, you can use a period to break the speech it into two sentences but keep them on the same line.
“Are you crying?” he asked incredulously. He turned to the rest of the team and yelled, “There’s no crying! There’s no crying in baseball!”
Questions
If your character is asking a question, simply use a question mark just like you would use a comma in a regular sentence with a dialogue tag (the tag is still left uncapitalized, unless it’s a name).
“You talkin’ to me?” the taxi driver asked.
“What kind of dog is this?” Borat asked as he gestured towards a tortoise.
Other Punctuation
Exclamation points, ellipses, and dashes work in a similar manner, with the beginning of the tag left uncapitalized (unless it’s a name):
“Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!” the French knight taunted.
“I wish I knew how to quit you…” he mused quietly.
She began yelling, “You mock my pain–”
“Life is pain,” Westley cut in. “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
Quotes Within Quotes
To indicate quotes within dialogue, use single quotation marks.
“Everyone is always telling me ‘you are so humble,’ and I’m like ‘oh my god I know,'” she said without irony.
Action Beats
Action beats illustrate what the speaker is doing while talking. They can augment or even replace dialogue tags, but they are not punctuated in the same way. Ultimately, they are sentences and should be treated as such — so make sure to capitalize the first letter and end with a full stop.
Dorothy closed her eyes and began tapping her heels together. “There’s no place like home…”
Once you get a hang of these simple rules it will become second nature, and then you can focus on content instead of commas!