: Script-style conversations in a book How good is it to use script-style conversations in stories? New Hampshire, 2144, Beside a sign at Bulgart st. James: Please, Robert, I don't have

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I think the crux of it is that anything you do that breaks convention will make your writing more difficult to read. That isn't to say you shouldn't do it, by the way (several of my favourite books take serious liberties with style and formatting), but it must be worth the effort. If a reader would be able to get everything they could possibly get from your writing, for less effort, if you used conventional formatting, they'll be (understandably) frustrated if you don't.

If not - if your choice adds something, and the effort is worth the reader's while - your only difficulty is convincing them to put the effort in in the first place. Once they do, they'll be glad they did.

As with all such things, though, it's ultimately a matter of taste. There are people who think anything "conventional" is bland and unadventurous, and wouldn't be seen dead reading mainstream fiction (or using the phrase "wouldn't be seen dead"). There are also people who think anything "unconventional" is a pointless attempt to seem clever, and that mainstream fiction is mainstream because it's just better.

For what it's worth, I think both of these positions are ridiculous, but that's beside the point.

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It's not unheard of to do this, but I wouldn't recommend doing it at the beginning of your book. Give the readers time to get to know the characters, then you can cut to a kind of short-hand between the characters. The reader should always be able to follow what is going on in the dialogue; if it's confusing, you failed them in the writing of the story.

Everything else in a novel should be like a novel. Screenplays are written for directors and actors to bring to life. A typical book reader wants you to paint an experience in their mind, which they can't get from watching TV or reading a screenplay. If you wanted to short-hand your first draft via a screen play method, that would be fine, as long as you go back and fill in the details to give book lovers what they expect from a book.

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Either you're writing a prose piece or you're writing a screenplay. Don't do both.

If you're doing some advanced stuff with formatting trying to represent different kinds of media (radio transcripts, chat logs), you might be able to have speaker tags the way you do above, but not ploppped down in the middle of a regular paragraph.

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