Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-30741304-20170513163321/@comment-28266772-20170530135731

Hey, you're welcome to the feedback! I'm glad you responded positively. I commend you on trying to address your weaknesses. I'm not particularly good at dialogue either. I include it but I swear it's never actually any good! I can, at least, help with dialogue tags.

First, yes you do need to include dialogue tags to make it clear who's speaking. But,  if you constantly write verb+adverb it becomes very very obvious and it can distract the reader. If every bit of spoken dialogue ends in the same pattern it can become quite awkward e.g. "she said brightly, he asked wryly, she shouted angrily, he answered happily" soon becomes obvious and off-putting. Below I've included a short extract from The Gym Teacher by HumboldtLycanthrope and I've highlighted the various dialogue tags he used. It's a good exercise to go over stories you've enjoyed and actively make a note of how they use dialogue tags.

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…he turned to her, pushed his glasses up his nose, and said, “Well that’s very interesting. What with the ice-cream cake and all. However, I was wondering, just how do you and your friends deal with the fact that we are all going to die? Do you have your little parties to just try and ignore it? Some festive occasion to take the impending fate of the grave off your mind? Or has it actually never crossed your little pea-sized brain that one day you will be dead?”

“Danny!” his mother shouted, slamming her fork down. “Stop that.” Gail blurted out a quick giggle and then covered her grin with a napkin.

“What?” Danny shouted. “It’s the truth! Grandma’s dead. And the odds are, mathematically, that you’re going to die next, mom.” He then turned his head to gaze at his sister, dramatically pushed his glasses up his nose, and squinting his eyes, murmured with a low, quiet voice, “and then you, Melissa.”

Melissa’s big eyes filled with tears and her lower lip began to quiver. “Mommy, you’re not going to die, are you?”

Gail calmly plopped a piece of tofu, dripping with sauce, into her mouth and while chewing it loudly, lips smacking, stated, “Well I see death as just another change and when the time comes I will welcome it as part of my soul’s journey.”

Melissa’s eyes grew wider and wider, tears brimming until they began to flow down her cheeks. She then let out a terrible wail and shouted, “I don’t want to die! I don’t want mommy to die!”

Danny’s mother threw down her napkin, pushed out her chair, and quickly strode over to the little girl, wrapping her arms around her and pressing her face—a knot of woe—against her belly, slowly rocking her and stroking her hair. “Shhh, mommy’s fine. Nothing is going to happen to mommy.” She shot an angry glance at Danny, hissing, “Look what you have done.”

“Like I care,” Danny shouted, leaping to his feet and knocking his chair to the ground, “You stupid fucking dike! You two are disgusting and you make me sick!”

“Danny! You apologize right now! This very instant! Where are you going?”

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So there’s a lot of different tags here. You have murmured, shouted, hissed, etc. Humboldt does a lot to keep his dialogue tags from stagnating. He inserts actions, varies the tag locations, and describes the way people speak in complex sentences that go beyond a simple adverb. There’s nothing wrong with simply going through a story like Humboldt’s and carefully noting all the different ways he uses dialogue tags and just stealing them for your own writing.

Other tags you can use include asked, answered, replied, announced, muttered, mumbled, and many many more (online lists do exist). Another thing you can do is insert actions between dialogue that don’t explicitly say “she said” but do make it clear who’s speaking.

For example,

“Why is there a camel in my fridge?” Danielle sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Now all my food is gone!”

This sentence never explicitly states Danielle is speaking but it’s clear from the writing that she’s the one talking. Words like sigh, moan, grumble, grimace, hiss, and others are the sort of things people do while speaking but which don’t actually count as speech. They can break up dialogue and by being attributed to the speaker they act as a sort of tag.

 Hope this helps.