Lady Dae Writes

            I have to say that it’s not very hard to answer this question. I remember when I first started announcing that I wanted to be a writer. I used to get all kind of mean comments like, “Well you better prepare to be poor,” or “You better have a backup plan.” Now when people ask what I plan to do with my English degree or with my life, I don’t tell them about my aspirations as a writer. I just tell them I plan to edit novels or something like that. I don’t need that negativity.

            But it got me to thinking, why do I write? Well it’s certainly not for the money because if that were the case I would have stopped when that person, who happened to be a close friend mind you, told me I was going to be poor.

            Well, I was raised under the belief that if I do what I love I will be successful and I’ll find a way to make money. Most importantly, I’ll be happy.

            Happy? How can you be happy and not have money. Let me put it like this, when I told my mother I wanted to be a writer or editor and major in English, she was not happen. She thought I was wasting my intelligence because I have the brains to be a doctor or scientist. I hate science, but I’m great at math. But I’ve always been good at telling stories and I enjoy writing stories and making other stories better.

            Over the years, she’s tried to help me cultivate all sorts of talent because I’m the kind of person who can put little effort into things and be really good at it. Music? Not for me. Management and financing. No way. Teaching. Not in this lifetime.

            You see I’m good at those things, but you couldn’t pay me enough to sit at a desk and count money or teach. I just hate doing it. But I’ll write and edit all day for free just because I love doing it and that’s what it boils down to.

            I love to write. And it didn’t matter whether I was good or bad at it. Because I enjoy it, I put the time into it to improve my craft and make it the best, not just do it well enough to make money. And that’s the kind of motivation needed for this career. Anyone can write a novel, but not everyone has the will to do it and persist, even after being reject hundreds of time.

            My point? I’m going to continue to write just like I have been doing for the past ten years because I want to write. The law of the universe is that you get out of something the effort you put into it and with this much effort, I just know that one day, all these hours writing and on forums is going to pay off.

I just happened to be looking through my writing and saw how far I’d come and how much stuff I had to learn on my own and by reading well written books and saw that my biggest problem in my beginnings was the use of quotations and punctuation dialogue. So to stop any other writer from falling into this pitfall, I’ve decided to give a less on quotations. Let’s start with the basics.

    Lady Dae said, “It’s time for a lesson on punctuating quotations.”

This is the basic structure when it comes to quotation; the quotation mark, followed by the quote or dialogue, a comma, the end quote, a space, plus the word said (or however they said it, scream), and the person who said it and a period.  And for the second example, there’s the tag description (Lady Dae said) followed by a comma a space, the quote mark, dialogue, punctuation (see further down) and the end quote. A variation of this type is this:

As you can see here the stronger punctuation took the place of the comma. When you have a strong punctuation (feeling or a question) use them, followed by your tag phrase and a period. If it’s just a sentence or phrase with not specific punctuations like a question mark or exclamations point, use a comma, the tag phrase, followed by a period.

I had problems with this too. While it’s fine to tag actions along with dialogue, certain actions can’t describe dialogue and need their own separate sentence. Grinning is not a way of talking or a type of communication. Therefore, if Lady Dae grins, she either grinned before she said it, said it with a grin, or grinned after she said it. Likewise the same is with shrugged. She either did it before, during, or after. So that means that you write the quote mark, dialogue, close it with a period, question mark, or exclamation point, and close it with the end quote. The sentence could have easily been written:

Or if the writer wants to describe the way Lady Dae is saying it we can use:

Teasing is a way of communication through talking; therefore, “teased” can be used in place of “said” when appropriate as can any other word that describes a way of talking.

This ties in with the last examples. You can’t describe dialogue with an action. Dialogue tags are really adverb or adjectives describing how something was said. But clapping isn’t a way of speaking. Likewise, a person can’t paused talking while talking. So each part is treated as its own sentence. In fact, all interjections in dialogue are treated like this. If it doesn’t describe the way it was spoken (said, asked, exclaimed, etc.) then close the quote with a period and start a new sentence before closing that off with a  period and picking back up the dialogue again. Also, because no one speaks in complete sentences all the time, it’s alright to use a fragment or two. In fact, in creative writing, fragments are allowed!

   Incorrect: “I didn’t know my flash drive drained my laptop battery that much”.
   Correction: “I didn’t know my flash drive drained my laptop batter that much.”

Sometimes a tag isn’t needed and all that is needed is the quote marks to indicate that someone is talking. Punctuation always goes inside the quotes, never outside them when there are no tags behind them.

5) This next one is one that I wasn’t quite aware of until I read a story in my literature book, but thankfully don’t have the need to use often. I’ll just quote one of my long rants here to illustrate.

See how there is no end quote after the first paragraph because Lady Dae continues talking? Anytime a character goes on a long rant and their dialogue has to be broken up into paragraphs, only use the end quote when the character is completely finished talking and it moves on to someone else or some type of description. I just learned this one, but it’s good to keep in mind if you have a character that tends to rant (Hermione Granger from Harry Potter comes to mind here). And now lastly…

First of all, I’m pretty sure I used ejaculated wrong right there and it makes me think of something else (namely something to do with the birds and the bees), but most importantly, while there’s nothing technically wrong here, I could have just used the word said or asked. A writer shouldn’t try to show how original or clever they are by finding every synonym for the word “said.” It just looks like the writer is trying to proof how smart they are or trying and failing to write a seventeenth century novel about some proper aristocracy. While it’s fine to sue those words, they should only be use like salt and pepper is used in food. Too many of those ‘said’ synonyms make stories read like purple prose. The writer can use them every now and then, but readers will get used to ‘said’ or ‘asked’ they won’t notice it’s there.

So that’s it. These are actually some of the things that are part of my ‘Things I Wish Someone Told Me’ series, but I thought the quotation mark needed its own post. If there’s anything I missed, let me know and I’ll add it.