A stupid grammar question.

Okay, so, say we've hit a point in the story where a fair bit of exposition is needed. Now if a character explaining things at length to another character, they're gonna need to pause, right? For breath and for dramatic reasons and the like. They'll need to be paragraphs in the dialogue, and I'm trying to make them follow naturally along with the pauses in the characters speech, because that's what you do right?

But I can't say "Heron paused" every time he pauses for speech, and there's some very short paragraphs in this upcoming monologue I'm writing.

How do I switch to a new line after one of these, without making it seem like a new person is talking? You see, I have it written like this:

It doesn't look like he's continuing to speak. What do I do to make it read how I want it to?

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The general rule is that, when a character has dialogue that stretches across two or more paragraphs, you do not use quotation marks at the end of any but the last paragraph. You still use normal punctuation (period, question mark, exclamation point) at the end of each paragraph.

However, to signal that the following paragraph(s) are still part of the dialogue and not part of the narration, they begin with an opening quotation mark.

Finally, at the last paragraph you do use a closing quotation mark at the end of the dialogue.

Notice the lack of quotation marks at the end of the first paragraph. That means the first character is still talking in the second paragraph.

edited 5th Apr '16 11:31:13 PM by Cid

Thank you!

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