Newsflash: a lot of stories have dialogue.
When you write a lot of dialogue, it can be tricky to keep it feeling interesting. If you’ve got a scene that’s mostly just two people taking turns to speak to each other, breaking up the lines of speech is probably a good idea so it doesn’t drag. If you’re anything like me, though, you’ve probably looked back at a page of conversation and realised it’s almost entirely punctuated with ‘they said’.
“I don’t feel like going today,” Dina said.
“Well, you should,” her mother said.
“But I don’t want to,” she said.
“I’ll drop you off,” her mother said.
“Alright, then,” Dina said.
Pretty repetitive, right?
Fortunately for us, there are plenty of things we can do instead of ‘said, said, said’, and here are three such things.
Before we jump into them, though, it’s worth noting a couple of caveats. Firstly, ‘said’ is usually fine. Like, you don’t want to overcomplicate things and draw attention to the sheer volume of esoteric dialogue tags you’re cramming in for the sake of avoiding ‘said’. It’s simple but it’s effective, and if it’s your most common go-to, that’s absolutely fine.
Secondly, as always, take all of this with a grain of salt. Take what you like and try it out, but the genre you’re writing in, your personal voice, your stylistic choices, what you’re trying to convey to your reader – all of these things will direct you in your writing. If that means you end up doing a Cormac McCarthy type thing where all your dialogue is just floating around unpunctuated in the text, great! If you’re writing a play or an audio script or something, you don’t need dialogue tags at all, so this won’t be a concern for you.
Let’s dive in.
1: More interesting dialogue tags
A dialogue tag is that little phrase that comes after a line of speech: ‘he said’, ‘whispered Evelyn hoarsely’, ‘Jean-Paul pontificated’. These usually give you some kind of name or pronoun identifying the speaker and a verb describing in more or less detail how they’re speaking.
‘Said’ is probably the least describey of the dialogue tags. It’s standard, it’s generic, and it really doesn’t communicate much of anything about how something’s been said. (Which sometimes makes it quite useful for bathos – if someone responds in a deadpan way to what should be a much more significant event, ‘said’ can be a bit of an amusing letdown.)
There are a lot of words with which you can replace ‘said’. In fact, there are over 300 of them on SP Wickstrom’s website, organised by emotion, type of utterance, and more.
I think it’s good to have a range of these in your toolkit, but to be sparing with the more unusual ones. TV Tropes has a whole page on the ‘Said Bookism’, which is essentially the phenomenon of writers pulling in any obscure word they possibly can in order to avoid writing ‘said’. It becomes a little purple-prose, a little archaic, a little twee – it can be distracting, and it can lessen the impact. If you’re dropping these fancier words in less often, their specificity hits harder.
Of course, there’s also the faithful adverb to fall back upon. A lot of people seem not to like adverbs, but I think they’re an incredibly useful tool – again, when used with discretion so you don’t have multiple ‘-ly’ words in every sentence. You can jazz up ‘said’ with whatever adverb, descriptive phrase, or modifier you like: quietly, aggressively, with relish, as if he were talking to a horse, in the most dejected tone imaginable, with a hiss that reminded Johnny of a frying sausage… the list goes on.
2: Action statements
Especially if you have long strings of dialogue that threaten to become overwhelming, breaking it up by briefly describing something that’s going on during the conversation is a reliable tactic.
“I wish I knew how to make it better,” said Amanda, “but I simply don’t.”
Roger grunted. “I don’t expect you to.” He glanced at the picture lying face-down on the table.
“Things will never be the same, will they?” A single tear rolled down Amanda’s face.
Simple but effective: rather than tagging every spoken line, you just take a quick look at what the speaker is doing while they speak (or in pauses). This allows you to break up long sequences of conversation quite naturally, I think, while also affording opportunities to keep things moving beyond just the immediate verbatim spoken words.
Of course, you can also combine actions with dialogue tags, as in something like:
“It’s no use!” he cried, slashing at the oncoming demon with his curved sword.
Basically, just don’t forget that people do tend to do things other than speak when they’re having conversations. Either they’re talking while they’re actually getting something else done (as in the above example in which the character is talking during a fight), or even if they’re just sitting down to talk, they’re probably looking around, fidgeting, sniffing, changing their expression, and so on.
3: Nothing whatsoever
One perfectly valid way of cutting down your ‘said’ count is to just eliminate tags entirely.
I wouldn’t recommend doing it all the time, unless it’s for some stylistic or thematic reason, but there’s no reason you can’t occasionally just have speech stand on its own. It does require that it’s clear who’s speaking, so it’s tricky to do extensively (even if there are just two alternating speakers, it can be easy for a reader to lose track of which one’s which after a while), but it can be a neat way of making brief exchanges a bit simpler and cleaner.
Here’s an example from my upcoming book Mortal Coils:
“You think we can do this?” she said quietly.
“Oh, probably not,” said [spoiler]. “But I don’t think we can not do it.”
“Helpful.”
“I try.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No, I don’t.”
Here, I think dropping any kind of tag, action, or embellishment makes this exchange feel quicker, snappier, hopefully even funnier. It works because there are only two speakers taking turns (and previous lines have established which is which) and it’s only a couple of lines each.
For lengthier exchanges, you can also drop tags and whatnot from just one line in a conversation rather than feel you have to add something to every time someone speaks:
“I wish you’d told me sooner,” said Jason. “I would have made the time to come and see you. You know I would have.”
Penelope sighed. “I know.”
“If there were any other way, anything at all that could be done… I’d do it.”
She nodded, a sad smile on her face. “I know that too.”
That third line doesn’t really need anything, I don’t think. It’s clear from the pattern of conversation that it’s Jason talking, so we don’t need to worry about making that clear. Maybe it would benefit from some line about his non-verbal behaviour at this moment – he might be wringing his hands or something – but it’s just an example.
Play with conventions. That’s what they’re there for.
So those are three simple things you can start trying immediately to avoid oversaturation of the dreaded ‘said’, if that’s a problem you’re experiencing. Again, though, these are just things you can try. If they work, great. If not, no problem.
The great thing about writing is that you can sort of do whatever you want, as long as it translates into your reader getting the experience you were trying to create. So if you feel that going completely off-book with how you write your dialogue is what will support the story you want to write, go for it!
For more writing tips, I’ve got a whole page you can check out right now.
Chris Durston 