“Hello World!” said THE Abyss.

on short stories and dialogue punctuation

Image by Author — “Hello World” is all about who makes the greeting isn’t it.

You don’t get to write a lot of dialogue in professional and technical writing.

So I had to use Google and look up these guys recently:

8 Essential Rules for Punctuating Dialogue - article

Which then became the seed of a new Hello World (see portfolio for my old ones).

You can take a guess at my professional background just by my choice of two words right? Hello World. “Oldy but a goldy”. And if you can’t, then we probably don’t share that background. Please don’t let that be an obstacle.

This hello world became a (very) short story instantly for me just by adding a who said it.

“Hello World!” said THE Abyss.

Sudden I wanted to know what was going to happen next. Who had awoken THE Abyss, why it was THE Abyss, not just ‘the’.

And why was there an exclamation mark? Was the Abyss cackling gleefully? In anger maybe? Or was it a playful happy greeting, maybe this was going to be a Terry Pratchett story.. (We miss you Terry!)