As a rule of thumb, four consecutive lines of dialogue is about as much as you want to have without a tag.
– Diana Gabaldon
Related Quotes:
- Dialogue doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Dialogue is contradictory, in that it can either speed up or slow down a passage. – Diana Gabaldon
- If you can’t look a line of dialogue in the face and say exactly why it’s there-”take it out or change it. – Diana Gabaldon
- I had sent her to four consecutive psychiatrists, and not one of them had gotten me sober. – Alcoholics Anonymous
- We play phone tag, back and forth, the kind of tag where it’s clear we’re avoiding each other, where no one wants to be touched, tagged, you’re it – Adam Berlin
- In trees, monkeys rule;on land, lions rule;in the sky, eagles rule;in the waters, whales rule. – Matshona Dhliwayo
- There’s a little trick called the Rule of Three: if you use any three of the five senses, it will make the scene immediately three-dimensional. – Diana Gabaldon
- She has to have four arms, four legs, four eyes, two hearts, and double the love. There is nothing -œsingle- about a single mom. – Mandy Hale
- Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it. – Steven Pressfield
- The law’s a necessary evil–we canna be doing without it–but do ye not think it a poor substitute for conscience? – Diana Gabaldon
- Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers. – Diana Gabaldon
- Reading is of course dry work, and further refreshment was called for and consumed. – Diana Gabaldon
- It’s always better if they see. Then they don’t imagine things. So I didn’t imagine, I remembered. – Diana Gabaldon
- You’re beautiful to me, Jamie,- I said softly, at last. -œSo beautiful, you break my heart. – Diana Gabaldon
- Good sex scene is about the exchange of emotions, not bodily fluids – Diana Gabaldon
- You want to anchor the scene with physical details, but by and large it’s better to use sensual details rather than overtly sexual ones. – Diana Gabaldon
- Don’t let characters talk pointlessly-”they only talk if there’s something to say. – Diana Gabaldon
- Pointing out the emotion in a scene is like laughing at your own jokes. – Diana Gabaldon
- If there’s true emotional content in a situation between characters, all you do is reveal it. – Diana Gabaldon
- Almost everybody understands that you have to have something at stake for a story to be good. – Diana Gabaldon
- Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades. – Diana Gabaldon
- All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death is the key to the gate that bars memory. – Diana Gabaldon
- I’ve seen women-and men too, sometimes-as canna bear the sound of their own thoughts, and they maybe dinna make such good matches with those who can. – Diana Gabaldon
- True, the body’s easily maimed, and the spirit can be crippled – yet there’s that in a man that is never destroyed. – Diana Gabaldon
- He has cat blood, I reflected sourly, no doubt that was how he managed to sneak up on me in the darkness. – Diana Gabaldon
- And I have wondered often, was I master in my soul, or did I become the slave of my own blade? – Diana Gabaldon
- Nay, he needs a woman, not a girl. And Laoghaire will be a girl when she’s fifty. – Diana Gabaldon
- Alive, and one. We are one, and while we love, death will never touch us. ‘The grave’s a fine and private place/ but none, I think, do there embrace. – Diana Gabaldon
- I want to hold you like a kitten in my shirt, and still I want to spread your thighs and plow ye like a rotting bull. I dinna understand myself. – Diana Gabaldon
- …knowing what o’clock it is gives ye the illusion that ye have some control over your circumstances. – Diana Gabaldon
- At the best of times, Father Bain’s face resembled a clenched fist. – Diana Gabaldon
- Every day I beat my own previous record for the number of consecutive days I’ve stayed alive. – George Carlin
- There is no labor from which most people shrink as they do from that sustained and consecutive thought. It is the hardest work in the world. – Leslie Householder
- We are all on stage, my dear. Sometimes we forget our lines, but luckily an offstage helper can whisper our lines to us until we get back on track. – Maria La Serra
- Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out. – Robert Henri
- Don’t focus on the words i write,pay attention to the ones i don’t.These lines won’t tell you much about me,try to read in between these lines. – Anjum Choudhary
- …when you’re hard and unyielding your words score me with lines – I hate lines – I want curves – curves are happy like a snowman … – John Geddes
- Parallel lines meet at infinity. Looking back from said point, do parallel lines ever not meet? – RJ Clawson
- You can’t draw lines in the sand like that. Humour’s a tsunami that doesn’t care about your little lines. – SA Tawks
- Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines. – Hideki Yukawa
- There are at least four distinct lines of proof in the Bible that the Holy Spirit is a person. – RA Torrey