I need your help. When writing a short story and someone speaks, how do you set it off? I know it goes on line by itself, but is it indented?
For example.
Mary said, "I love you."
OR
"I love you."
Do you indent like a paragraph?
Help. I've forgotten. I wrote plays and poems, so short stories are new to me.
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Comments: 19
Each time the speaker changes it is a new paragraph.... are you separating paragraphs by indenting or by a skipped line between paragraphs? Separate the speakers in the same way....
What are you writing?
Angel
Example (From Saving Gracie, by me):
"Hello, Grace Larabie speaking," she said, struggling to keep her breathlessness from her voice.
"Well, darling, you've certainly proven your point."
"Mother?" That was a surprise. Mrs. Joseph Larabie was the last person Grace had expected to be on the other end of the line, if only because her father disapproved in the extreme of her daughter's means of supporting herself, and her mother never went against her father. "You never call the office. Is something wrong?"
Sorry, I'm not much of a writer.
And, now, I just read a comment about a publisher's "house style". So, an author might have to go through and change their entire novel just to conform to a prescribed style? Oh, boy. That's something that I've obviously never had to deal with.
As for there being a traditional way to write an attribution, "said" and "asked" are just about all you need. Other words, like "stated", "pleaded", etc. can be conveyed in the actual words the person is saying, or in the action that's going on. Peppering in fancy attribution words when "said", "asked", or even no attribution would work just shows a lack of experience rather than creativity, in my opinion.