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Hello everyone.

I have a question about writing dialogue in fiction. What I can't seem to find on the net are the rules for how to show that two people are communicating with each other in writing.

Say your two characters are chatting via an instant messenger. Is it treated like normal dialogue? Also, what sort of tag would one use... would it be "he said" or "he wrote" or something totally different?

Any help would be much appreciated :)

I don't think there are any strict rules for writing dialogue, especially the newer stuff like IM chats. So as long as your dialogue makes sense and is easy to separate from regular text, you have some freedom in what you do.

For instant messaging, you can write it pretty much as it appears in real life on screen. There have been whole books written like chat dialogue, though I'm not sure how enjoyable it would be to read them. So you could write a dialogue something like this:

"Jason sat down at the computer and logged into his messaging service.

Jace124 has logged in.

Maebaby: hey jace. what's up
Jace124: not much. goin to a movie soon with rachel.
Maebaby: oooh what movie?
Maebaby: omg g2g. dinner's ready! talk to you later.
Jace124: bye

Maebaby has signed out."

Hopefully your dialogue is more exciting that that. But basically, it can be and, for IMs, usually should be close to the real thing. You can put different people's text in different colors and use abbreviations like 'ttyl' if you want. I'd try to keep those to a minimum, though...like maybe a 'lol' here and there. Chatspeak and abbreviations are hard to read and make your character seem immature, especially if you're writing a book for adults or even older teens, so consider your audience.

Also, remember who your characters are and write realistically. A college student looking for help with research online will probably have less chatspeak and better grammar than a teen chatting with friends, for example. Generally, grammar mistakes and abbreviations are ok, even encouraged, in IM dialogue because that's close to the real thing. If you write in a country accent, for example, you are going to have apostrophes and minor grammar mistakes everywhere; this is ok because you are imitating how someone with that accent would speak. Same goes for IMs.

If you have doubts about whether your dialogue makes sense and will be clear to a reader, read it out loud. If you are losing track of who said what or what's going on, the reader will probably have even more trouble.

I hope this helps you a bit! :)

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(Rating: 5) Thank you! I really appreciate the time you took to answer my question. Definitely puts me on the right track.
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