![]() Whispered, stuttered, stammered, gasped, urged, hissed, babbled, blurted.ĭeclared, insisted, maintained, commanded.Ĭried, mumbled, sobbed, sighed, lamented. Shouted, yelled, babbled, gushed, exclaimed. Shouted, bellowed, yelled, snapped, cautioned, rebuked.Ĭonsoled, comforted, reassured, admired, soothed. ![]() Here are dialogue words you can use instead of ‘said’, categorised by the kind of emotion or scenario they convey: The reader gets to fill in the blank spaces, prompted more subtly by the clues you leave (an exclamation mark or a pointed, cross remark). Using dialogue tags sparingly allows your reader the pleasure of inferring and imagining. The brevity, the fact it’s only two words, conveys his tone. Similarly, in the first speaker’s retort, we don’t need a tag telling us his tone (that it’s curt, sarcastic, or hostile). Because it’s on a new line, and responds to what the other said, we know it’s a reply from context. The strength of the exclamation mark in the second character’s reply makes any dialogue tag showing emotion (e.g. A stronger sense of dialogue’s ‘back and forth’.īecause it’s clear the glaring first-person ‘I’ is the character speaking at first, we don’t need to add ‘I said’. In the second, making glaring an action rather than tethering it to the dialogue gives us a stronger sense of the scene. “Well I wasn’t listening, was I!” he said.įor some authors, it’s a matter of stylistic preference.Įven so, it’s hard to argue that the first version is better than the second. Whenever you read the author attributing who said what, it reminds us a narrative convention is being used.Ĭompare these two versions of the same conversation: Romy Sommer in ‘Writing dialogue: What to avoid’, webinar preview here. Keep it as tight as possible, and move as quickly as possible into the purpose of the conversation. Novel writing coach Romy Sommer says of dialogue: The more we read ‘he said’ and ‘she said’, the more we’re aware of the author creating the dialogue. The problem with dialogue tags is they draw attention to the author’s hand. ![]()
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