EDITING: Dialogue & POV
Point of View
- Has the right POV per scene been chosen? Has the POV from the character with the most at stake emotionally been used?
- Is the POV consistent throughout the scene? Or does the scene head-hop from one character’s POV to another’s POV?
- Is the POV character clear from the beginning of the scene?
- Is the narrative true to the POV character for what he is seeing and experiencing?
Dialogue
- Does the dialogue say what needs to be said?
- Does the dialogue have a point, serve a purpose (supplying description, showing character development, expressing ideas important to the story)?
- Does the dialogue depend on tags to get a point across?
- Is the dialogue true to what a character would say?
- Are there minimal speaker attributions used other than “said” (hissed, barked, explained, etc.)?
- Can any speaker tags be eliminated?
- Is there action interspersed through the conversation?
- Are the dialogues too long, sounding like speeches?
- Do the conversations sound natural?
- Are names used too often in conversations?
- Do the different characters “sound” different?
- Have contractions, slang, idioms and regionalisms been used to give a sense of character and place?
- Does the use of dialect disrupt the reading, such as creative spelling?
- Is there too much internal dialogue?
- Can thinker attributions be converted in internal monologue by changing it to third person or Italicization?
- Are actions with pieces of dialogue repeated too much?
Grammar & Punctuation in Dialogue
- Do too many adverbs follow the quotation marks?
- Are a couple of dashes (–) used to show an interruption?
- Is an ellipsis (…) used to show a pause or a gap?
