I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words of dialogue in my novels over the years. During that time, I’ve developed a set of guidelines for myself about how I deploy dialogue tags. Today, I’d like to share them with you.
First, so we’re on the same page, a dialogue tag is the narration before, after, or in the middle of a piece of a character’s dialogue that signals who is speaking. For example, “Did you hear that? They shut down the main reactor. We’ll be destroyed for sure,” C-3PO said.
#1: Only use a tag if you have to
If two characters are passing dialogue back and forth in a simple conversation, then dialogue tags aren’t really necessary. Take this scene for example:
Chewbacca put his hands on hips and growled.
“You said it, Chewie,” Han said. “Where did you dig up that old fossil?”
“Ben is a great man,” Luke said.
“Yeah, great at getting us into trouble.”
“I didn’t hear you give any ideas.”
“Well, anything’s better than just hanging around here waiting for ‘em to pick us up.”
“Who do you think –”
But their arguments stalled as Artoo began beeping wildly.
In this example, the first two lines of dialogue set up who is talking – Han and Luke – but after that, we don’t need tags because they’re going back and forth. Also, this dialogue is a *snappy* back and forth, so there’s no room for blocking or other narration. Here’s the example again with too many tags.
Chewbacca put his hands on hips and growled.
“You said it, Chewie,” Han said. “Where did you dig up that old fossil?”
“Ben is a great man,” Luke said.
“Yeah, great at getting us into trouble,” Han said.
“I didn’t hear you give any ideas,” Luke said.
“Well, anything’s better than just hanging around here waiting for ‘em to pick us up,” Han said.
“Who do you think –” Luke said.
But their arguments stalled as Artoo began beeping wildly.
Wow, those unnecessary tags really drag the scene down, don’t they? Ugh.
Dialogue tags are most important when a whole group of people are talking, and the reader needs to know how the conversation is passing from one character to the next.
#2: Use blocking to signal the speaker
Instead of using a dialogue tag, you can employ blocking to focus the scene’s “camera” on a particular character. “Blocking” is a term borrowed from theatre that shows what the characters’ bodies are doing within the space of the scene. For example:
Luke focused on what Obi-Wan held in his hands. “What is it?”
“It’s your father’s lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”
Luke took the hilt in his hand and toggled the controls. A beam of discreet, white-blue energy sprang from the hilt. The beam was the length of a sword blade and hummed with boundless energy.
Obi-Wan continued as Luke experimented with the saber. “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi knights were guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times, before the Empire.”
Luke extinguished the blade, sat down, and leaned toward Obi-Wan. “How did my father die?”
The old man took a steadying breath. “A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights. He betrayed and murdered your father.”
The focus of this scene is the lightsaber in Luke’s hands. Writing the dialogue around what Luke is doing with the saber allows the writer to signal the speaker through blocking rather than tags.
#3: Use “said” almost all the time
Using a plethora of dialogue tags is one of the surefire ways to get me not to read past page five of a book. If the author obviously had the thesaurus open to the “says” entry, I’m DNFing that book right away. I have a low threshold for characters who “exclaim” their dialogue. Same goes for “declare,” “remark,” “utter,” and “state.”
I’d have to do a pretty extensive bit of statistical analysis on my books, but my gut tells me that I use “said” about 85% of the time a dialogue tag is needed. Why? Because if you always use “said” the word disappears on the page. The reader glosses over it, which is great when all you’re trying to do is help the reader know who’s talking. On the other hand, if one character “utters” something, and the next character “declares” something, and then a third character “exclaims” something, the reader is going to misspend their mental energy on dialogue tags when it is better spent elsewhere on the page.
The other 15% of my tags fall under two categories. The first has to do with questions. I use “ask” as a tag second most frequently. The second category has to do with volume. I’ll use “yell,” “shout,” and “whisper” fairly often too.
#4: Don’t modify tags with adverbs
This is an extension of something I wrote a whole article about last November. If “declare” and “exclaim” tax a reader’s mental energy, then adding adverbs to dialogue tags does so even more. Recall our example from Harry Potter:
“Come on, Ron, you were always saying how boring Scabbers was,” said Fred bracingly.
What does “bracingly” even mean? We know from the words Fred is saying that he’s trying to cheer Ron up. We don’t need an adverb appended to the tag.
The rule here is that your dialogue should be compelling enough to convey within the speaking what a lazier writer conveys with an adverb. If a character is speaking “quickly,” give them short, staccato sentences. If they’re speaking “tediously,” let the dialogue ramble on a little too long.
#5: Make sure your characters have their own voices
In real life, everyone has their own distinctive manner of speaking: speech patterns, idioms, pacing, tone, word choice. Characters in novels should too, even though they are all written by the same person. The best test to see if your characters speak distinctly is to copy and paste a dialogue-heavy scene into a new document and remove everything but the spoken words. Give this document to someone who hasn’t read the book and see if they can sort out how many speakers are in the scene and who is speaking when. If the reader can get 75% or more right, you’ve done a pretty good job differentiating your characters’ speech patterns.
I’m sure there’s more I could say about dialogue tags, but this article is already twice as long as I meant it to be, so I’ll stop there. I invite you, the next time you are reading a novel, to pay attention to how the author uses dialogue tags. When are they distracting, and when do they melt into the page, giving you just enough information to follow the narrative. The latter is what we’re going for.
Adam Thomas, Author 