The comma is not my lover, nor is it even my friend; when dealing with quotations it may be my greatest foe.

After years of wondering how punctuation and dialog work together, today I grasped ( and punched and prodded ) the rules of comma engagement. In the vicious struggle,
I claim a partial victory. The manuscript is better, though my eyes ache courtesy project fix fractured dialog.

Since punctuation glitches are make or break at this stage of my career – though probably less so later, as I’ve heard that established authors often hand in completed works riddled with basic errors – dialog seems a good focus for revisions. For a stickler, grammar is easy crime to hang on a novice. The idea is that the fewer points of grammar violated, the less reasons an agent has to say no. Right now the pitch is ready, the story ( more on this later ) is tight, the writing flows. That reminds me, I need a fresh supply of heavy weight paper. Anyway, I must be reasonably certain about the presentation. Catching everything won’t happen, and can not, perfection is impossible, but I can aim high.

Initially, the target was clarity of character, packaging each spoken line clearly so what character said a given snippet made immediate sense. Whether the dialog corresponded with something the character might say is a problem for later. I’ve got a touch of character meld in spots, and that can persist until the final stretch.

The big hangup: where in dialog, if anywhere, does the comma belong?

Rules make for boring reading, so I’ll spare everyone my studies save the following lesson. A comma separates a quote from a tag.

What does that mean in English?
“Brian, you ignorant slut.” Kathy said. << Needs a little work. “Damn Kathy, stop licking that,” Brian said. << BING BING! This works when there is a quote and a tag. And what if there is no tag? Out comes Mr. Period. “Oh, I will lick it off,” She seethed at Brian. << Naughty, naughty girl. “Right then. I will stop right now.” She seethed at Brian. << Someone gets a cookie! Seethed is not considered a tag, it’s part of a separate sentence. Hence no comma. The upshot of this journey is the first 145 pages now have better comma placement in dialog. Additionally, I found many instances of quotes where the identity of the speaker was murky and adjusted them. This added quite a few words to the manuscript. In fact, it contributed more to the word count than any other session this week. That’s a lot of he said, she said. EDIT – Saturday 11:35 EST – all 251 pages have clear quote attribution and comma placement in dialog. Check out that word count meter now, huh? 72, 871. Geez, if I revert to passive voice and modify roughly 1 verb per sentence out of 4957 sentences thus far, diluting the voice would mean nearly 5,000 additional words. Don’t worry, though, I avoid passive voice unless conveying the same meaning with active terms makes the sentence cumbersome. For instance, “John is screwed” To me, that’s an acceptable use of passive voice. Why? Because, who screwed John is a lot less important than his predicament. Sorry about that, John. On the other hand, “John was screwing old ladies out of money” makes my ears ache. It’s not horrid, but no doubt with a little imagination I could make it so: “John was recklessly screwing aged ladies out of precious ducats earned through years of service in the court of the Crimson King.” Wow. There’s a verb in the above sentence somewhere, I just know it.