Writing Dialog Punctuation

I love to write dialog for fiction. I seem to have a natural instinct for translating character voice to written words.

I have a lot of weakness, but I'm not going to focus on those in today's post.

I act as editor for six different aspiring writers. What we write is just for fun and to entertain others who have the same interests as we do. We all know that our "fiction" has no chance of being published, because we are taking the ideas of others and running with. With the express delight and permission from the original creators.

One thing I've noticed is that when I first start working with a new author, we have to take the first three or four chapters to work on the correct way to punctuate dialog. I personally had errors in dialog punctuation when I first started writing, so I have a lot of patience with my writers.

Now, I find that my dialog punctuation is automatically correct. I don't even notice it as I type away, which is the point all authors should strive to get at. If we are worried about correct punctuation, we can not possibly write good, easy flowing, natural sounding dialog.

I'm sure there are even better sites that explain dialog punctuation, but this one is really simple and most of my writers have said it was easy to understand.

I'll talk about other things I learned about dialog in an upcoming post.