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Dialogue is a crucial part of fiction, revealing character traits, emotions, and subtext. It can also create irony and reveal the narrator’s trustworthiness. Tags and separate lines are used to distinguish speakers. Dialogue can also appear in nonfiction, poetry, and news articles.
An integral part of many fictional pieces is the dialogue, or the actual words spoken by the characters. Passages in fiction are often referred to as dialogue in quotation marks (” “) and tell the reader that a character is speaking. Dialogue plays a crucial role in works of fiction and can serve to function as more than just an exchange of banter between characters.
The dialogue must be between two or more characters. When a character speaks to himself, it is called a monologue, which can also be indicated in quotation marks. Dialogue can reveal a number of things to the reader about particular characters and can be especially revealing when confronted with their inner thoughts or actions during the fictional piece. Indeed, some authors will write most, if not all, of their piece as one long dialogue. Plato is known for this technique.
The dialogue, of course, isn’t limited to just fiction. It may appear in nonfiction, nonfiction, poetry, news articles, etc., but in fiction, it has a purpose that goes beyond just conveying what a particular character is saying. Dialogue can reveal hostility between characters; may reveal subtext, or emotions and ideas not explicitly expressed in the prose; and can give the reader a hint as to where the character might be from, what his life is like, what his level of education might be, etc. It can also give the reader an idea of whether or not a narrator is trustworthy, assuming the narrator is one of the participants in the dialogue.
Authors will often use excerpts of dialogue to lead the reader into certain ironies – particularly verbal irony, in which a character says one thing but actually means something else. Depending on the mood the author is trying to convey, they may choose to write their dialogue as a quick back-and-forth style, or as a slower, more deliberate exchange. To slow the pace and also to make sure the reader can keep track of who is speaking, writers will include tags at the end of some lines, such as “she said” or “he asked.” Tags can also appear at the beginning or middle of lines of dialogue, but most commonly appear at the end.
Lines of dialogue are most commonly split into separate lines to further distinguish who is speaking. Here is a short example of a dialogue split on separate lines and also using tags:
“Where are you going?” Bill asked.
“At the supermarket,” Shelly said.
“Can you get me some orange juice?”
“Yes,” Shelly said, “I can.”
