follow-up of dialogue lists?

FallenAngel said:

"How were you doing it wrong?" Hansel asked
"Why must love suck so much" Said Enrique breaking the silence.

When I write the second one in Microsoft word. It gives me an error. I know something is wrong there.

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It could be the "Said" before Enrique which should be lowercase, since the same sentence continues. Plus you need a question mark after "much" (since it's a question) and a comma after "Enrique".

If you haven't already got it, buy yourself a copy of Strunk & White's Elements of Style, a very useful little reference book.

I also know as a writer I can basically bend the rules, but by how much?. Every time I write a followup to the dialogue it feels..monotonous. I'm not happy with it and it just feels like I am writing just to get the boring part over with.

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Try to get into the speaking character's head a little more. Are they bored with the conversation too? Why don't they talk about the stuff they want to talk about instead? That's how people usually direct conversations.

Another thing im wondering if there is a list and rules on character description. What rules must I follow when describing a character that enters the scene.

Questions asked:

What order should I describe a character?
Clothes, hair, skin color etc.
What is the limit on character description?
How much is too much description?( in other words)

Same would go for a city, village or place.

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How does your favorite author do this? Re-read his/her novels and check this out. Do it that way until you get a feel for it.

And no, alas, there aren't any magic lists or rules for this. The only rough guideline I can offer is stop when it gets boring.

-Derek

Derek's kindly just about covered it all, FA. Just to show the changes Derek suggested on your dialogue tags:

"Why must love suck so much?" said Enrique, breaking the silence.

On character description:

Some authors don't describe there characters at all, some do a little, some do a lot: it just depends on your style (how you choose to do it).

Best advice like Derek said: get a good style and grammar reference book, and just take a nose at the fiction books you have on your shelves. It's the best way to master the basics.

And welcome to the forum, hun.

You don't end a quotation without any punctuation. If there's nothing else, there's a comma before the end quotation mark.

"I love Butch," she said.

What comes first in physical description depends on what's most important, or most striking, or most meaningful to the situation or to another character. You might say, Kanto was from Hester III, so he had the usual six limbs and three eyes. You wouldn't say, Joe was from Earth, so he had the usual four limbs and two eyes, (unless Joe was being described by a non-human character).

Sometimes a bit of description comes in this way: He walked in the door and I looked up. And up and up. He must have been almost seven feet tall, and my five-two suddenly made me feel like another, inferior, species.

What you don't usually do is start out with a detailed physical description. Usually, you need to get the sex straight from the beginning. After that, the race, and then the hair color and general body type come in. People don't want to picture a short fat white blond guy for ten pages, and then find out he's tall, lean, black and bald. The other stuff doesn't matter as much.

But there are genre differences. Romances tend to describe the hero in more physical detail, for instance.

And sometimes, with some readers, you can't win. There's a series of books (Barry Maitland's Brock and Kolla mysteries) in which the male lead has a beard, and I'm surprised by it every time. I cannot seem to picture him with it.

FallenAngel said:

But im wondering if there's any lists or complete lists of following dialogues like the examples I said above.

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http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=133858

Fallen said:

Derek's kindly just about covered it all, FA. Just to show the changes Derek suggested on your dialogue tags:

"Why must love suck so much?" said Enrique, breaking the silence.

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Just to be picky, I'd probably lose the breaking the silence bit. If, in the scene, there's been a section without dialogue, then Enrique's sentence obviously breaks that silence.

Depends on the scene. Breaking the silence suggests something uncomfortable in the atmosphere (as does what he says). Either way, I'd lose it and show some effect of the silence being broken: Enrique struggling to force the words out, someone else fidgeting, the location feeling too hot/constricting.