Writing popular fiction

knocked on the Halseys' front door.
    In a moment, Bill Halsey answered the knock. "Jack! How are you? We haven't seen you in weeks."
    "Actually," Moffet said, "I'm not too good, Bill."
    "Oh?" Halsey said, ushering him into the livingroom. "What's the problem?"
    Jack nodded to Lena, Bill's wife, and said, "I may sound like a paranoid, but I honestly believe someone is trying to kill me. I think they've been watching my house at night, waiting to build up their nerve."
    That's more to the point. However, you can go overboard when compressing dialogue. Avoid something as hasty as this:
Jack Moffet hesitated, then knocked on the Halseys' front door. In a moment, Bill Halsey answered the knock. Before he could say anything, Moffet said, breathlessly, "Someone is trying to kill me, Bill. I need your help!"
    Dialogue is essential to the rhythm of a story, and few novels are bought that contain less than twenty or thirty percent dialogue. A book filled with heavy, narrative paragraphs is not as psychologically appealing to the browsing book buyer as one in which the narrative is broken regularly by sprightly stretches of short, conversational exchanges between characters.
    However, a very long section of dialogue can become as boring as page after page of unrelieved narrative. Sometimes, in mystery and suspense novels when the hero must finally explain how a situation is to be resolved or is to identify the killer to the other characters, the writer must present a great deal of information as dramatically as possible. In order not to bore the reader with page-long soliloquies by the hero, you can interrupt the hero by having other characters challenge his facts, his conclusions, or pose other questions for him to answer. And, if the reader has already been shown the killer's identity and how the hero arrived at his conclusions, you will not want to repeat everything verbatim to enlighten the other characters. In a situation like this, you can employ indirect dialogue to sum up what has already been shown. For example:
Joe Black waited until they were all seated in the drawing room, then, succinctly, told them how Mrs. Housel had been murdered, who the killer was, and why the crime had been committed.
    Direct dialogue is preferable in every case except these: (1) when one character must tell another of an event the reader has already seen, as in the example above, (2) when one character must explain to another character something which the reader does not have to hear in detail ["Joe Black told Lord Randolph how to load and use the pistol if he should need it"], and (3) when a long section of direct dialogue could be made more rhythmic and interesting by the use of a few lines of indirect dialogue, as in this example:
He got to his feet a moment before Tilly entered the room, and he smiled at her, weakly. He was surprised he could smile at all.
    "Are you all right?" she asked.
    "Yes, Tilly."
    "What was that noise?"
    "A shot." He had decided to hide nothing from her.
    She was shocked. "A shot?"
    "Yes." He pointed to the broken glass and said, "It came through the window."
    "Are you hurt?"
    "No, no," he said. "I dropped out of sight when I saw him standing there, just before he pulled the trigger."
    "For heaven's sake, before
who
pulled the trigger?" she asked, her elfin face drawn up in a knot of tight lines.
    "It was Richard," he said.
    "Why would he want to kill you?"
    As quickly as he could, he told her why, told her everything he had learned last night.
    She sat down in the nearest chair. "It's hard to believe!"
    "I found it hard to believe too, at first."
    "If he means to kill you, he means to kill me as well."
    He agreed.
    The lines "As quickly as he could…" and "He agreed" are examples of indirect dialogue mixed with direct, to give a more varied tone.
    Finally, don't go searching for synonyms to replace the word "said." These simple variants will suffice in almost every case: shouted, called, replied, asked, insisted. If more force is required, stick to common words like these: cried, screamed, howled, wailed. Avoid, at all costs, melodramatic substitutes of this nature: ejaculated, belched, conjectured, shrilled.
    The title is the first thing (besides the cover illustration, which is not in the author's province anyway) to attract a genre book buyer's attention. It should be dramatic, colorful, and intriguing; it should generate in the reader a desire to know what kind of story it describes. A title should promise