Prose Workshop with Helen Hagemann: Dialogue and Dialogue tags

Dialogue and Dialogue Tags: Prose Workshop with Helen Hagemann @ the Fremantle Arts Centre, Friday 16th October 1pm-3pm.  Reading an extract from Tim Winton's Cloudstreet, together with writing exercises and discussions on the "setting out" of dialogue and dialogue tags. We will also look at Winton's unpunctuated dialogue.

Venue:  Room 3, Upstairs, North Wing
Cost:  $20 OOTA - $25 NON-OOTA

TIM WINTON was born in Perth in 1960. He has written many much-loved books for children and adults. His work is published in many countries and languages and his stories have been made into plays and films. Tim lives with his family by the sea in Western Australia, and often writes about the sea in his books. His is a patron of the Australian Marine Conservation Society and has campaigned to save Western Australia's Ningaloo Reef from development.

Dialogue and Choices of Speech Tags

(Extract) from Field of Words


The best dialogue doesn’t require attribution tags at all (not even ‘said’, as can be seen in Margaret Atwood’s dialogue-only story, There Was Once, or in Tim Winton’s, Cloudstreet; read an extract here.) because the characters are so well-drawn and the actions are so clear, the reader can distinguish the emotional context and delivery of the word. So what do you use instead of dialogue tags? Usually said/replied/asked, or their present tense equivalent. These tags ‘disappear’ from the dialogue because the reader is concentrating on what is said (that is, they’re focused on the story). This is not to say that we never use dialogue tags – sometimes they are necessary – what it does mean is that we use tags with intention.

(Extract) Don't be scared: dialogue without quotation marks by Richard Lea

Like many of the symbols habitually used to mount text on to the page, inverted commas have a long and complicated history. The impetus to standardise the use of quotation marks came from the "drive for realism" shown by authors such as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson as they experimented with the newest form of literature, the novel. The 1748 edition of Clarissa separated speakers with "dashes or new lines", but sometimes placed an opening quotation mark "at the exact point at which a quotation began, with a new 'mark of silence', or closing quotation mark ("), accompanying it where the quotation ended".

By stripping away a couple of centuries of typographical convention,  Winton like Samuel Beckett and James Joyce doesn't just give us the characters' brief or accented speech, he also aligns himself with the kind of author who's been ignoring typographical convention all along.