Writing a novel.

[x-darshee.livejournal.com]

Hello! (:
First, I’d like to say thank you to the creator of this community! Creating this community was an excellent idea, because I think
writers can communicate with other writers and definitely learn new things to improve their writing skills. Kudos, my friend.

Okay, now to introduce myself.
My name is Darshee, fifteen, from Malaysia. I'm currently half-way through finishing a fantasy-genre novel. However, I myself have noticed that I have problems with grammar and similar ballparks. In where I'm living, they don't teach us stuff like this, so I rely on dictionaries and reading. Therefore, please excuse my wrong usage of language. I'm still learning! Hahaha.

What I really want to know, right now, is the main and most important rules on writing a novel.

For example:

"Thank you." He said?
"Thank you," he said with a smile?

I'm confused, and was hoping someone could explain the whole concept to me.
Thank you so much!

Darshee.

Comments

[starlight83.livejournal.com]

For some reason, a lot of native speakers have issues with this, too.

Anytime you use he said/she whispered/he yelled/etc. you'll want to use a comma to separate it from the speech. So:

"Good morning," she said.

"Good morning," she grumbled as she poured herself some coffee.

Use a full stop if you're actually starting a whole new sentence and not just saying WHO your speaker is.

"Good morning." She smiled.

Note that when you use something like, "she smiled" you need to use a full stop since a person can't actually smile dialogue. This is a mistake a lot of native English speakers make.

You can inject the "he said" stuff into the middle of your dialogue, too. In that case, you use commas if you're not at the end of the sentence in your dialogue, and a full stop if you are. Examples:

"Good morning. The meeting will begin," she said and checked her watch, "at eleven o'clock."

"Good morning," she said. "The meeting will begin at eleven o'clock."

I hope that helps. I'm not generally a very good teacher, so if you need clarification on any of that, I'd be happy to take another shot.

*comment edited multiple times because I'm an idiot.

[x-darshee.livejournal.com]

I don't agree on the you not being a good teacher part. This helped me a lot! Thank you. My english teachers should learn from you. Hahaha!

Thank you so much!
You're definitely no idiot when it comes to this. (:

[starlight83.livejournal.com]

Everyone I've tried to teach grammar to has lasted about a day with me before jumping ship. Maybe I've just never had a good student! :)

I wanted to add one more rule to this, because it was done incorrectly once in the comments above. ^

If you have punctuation at the end of a bit of dialogue that isn't a period (like a question mark or an exclamation point) you leave that in the dialogue and put a period at the end of your "he said" tag. So you'd have sentences like:

"Can you help me with this?" she asked.

"Of course!" he replied.

And if you don't have a tag, it works pretty much the same way that full stops do:

"Can you help me with this?" She looked upset.

He slung an arm around her shoulders. "Of course!"

[x-darshee.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness, thank you so so so much! *hug.
You're amazing.