Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Writing Dialogue

The largest gap in knowledge I've seen on Wattpad is people's ability to handle dialogue. Dialogue is the words that are being said by your characters. You know, those things in quotation marks? 

Alright, let's start with the basics. A simple piece of dialogue is enclosed by quotation marks.  

"I like you."  

If you're trying to denote something being said, this is enough. However, you don't really know who is saying it. To indicate who is talking, you'd add something called a dialogue tag. A dialogue tag is usually combined to your quoted text with a comma.   

"I like you," she said.  

A dialogue tag has two objectives. First, it denotes who is talking. Second, it denotes HOW they are talking. Notice that 'she' is not capitalized. This is because the dialogue tag resides in the same sentence as the quotations. It modifies HOW YOU SAY IT. Every dialogue tag will modify how the person is saying something. 

"I like you," she whispered. 

You get that instead of saying it in a normal voice, she is saying it in a lower voice. Now, if you want to denote what she is doing while she says it, that becomes a descriptive beat. A descriptive beat does not affect how she says it, but what she's doing while she says it. 

 "I like you." She gave him a hug.  

Notice that 'she' is now capitalized, because it's the start of a new sentence.  If it's a proper noun like someone's name, it would always be capitalized, but when using pronouns, it changes. 

Now, you can also put the dialogue tags/descriptive beats (hereby referred to as a modifier) in between two pieces of dialogue. If you do, you should connect BOTH sides with a comma.  

"I like you," she said, "a lot."  

But ONLY if it's the extension of a single sentence. If there were no modifier it would read 

"I like you a lot." 

Now if you had two separate sentences, you would use capitalizations and a period.  

"I like you," she said. "You know that, right?"  

This "rule" can be broken if you're using the sentence in the same way you might use a semi-colon, making the dialogue comma seemingly optional and up to your choice.  

"I like you," she said, "you're beautiful."  

In the example above, the dialogue is "I like you; you're beautiful." which is a semicolon'd (two independent sentences) cut with a dialogue tag.  

Now, what a lot of people try to do is have two modifiers on a single piece of dialogue. YOU CANNOT DO THIS!  

DO NOT: She nodded, "I like you," she said.  

INSTEAD DO THIS: "I like you," she said, nodding.  

Alright, when you are done with the dialogue, you must start a new paragraph. This is the mortal sin a lot of people make.  

"I like you," she said.

"I like you too," he responded.  

DO NOT: "I like you," she said."I like you too," he responded.  

This INCLUDES more descriptions. Once your dialogue is finished, you'll usually move to a new paragraph. When you start a dialogue, it should start with a new paragraph (modifier can come first).