Attributing your dialogue

Writing dialogue in 3-D, part 5 of 6

Introduction

Have you ever read (or written) something where it became confusing and hard to keep straight who was speaking in a dialogue scene?

Maybe you had it all straight for a few lines, then you got lost. Who said that? Who’s talking now? And you have to go back to the beginning and count down the lines to orient yourself to who said what.

That’s what dialogue attribution aims to avoid.

And there are many ways to do this.

Dialogue tags

Dialogue tags (I said, she said, he asked) do good and necessary things. They help the reader keep straight in their mind who is speaking. This reduces confusion and readers getting lost in dialogue scenes.

Photo by Angèle Kamp on Unsplash

Dialogue tags can become a problem when they’re overused. Keeping them to a minimum is the key.

With almost any writing issue, overuse is the problem rather than a ‘never do this’ rule. This is true with dialogue tags.

Readers can get lost because of too few dialogue tags, unable to keep up with who is speaking, but too many dialogue tags can be just as bad, especially if the writer tries to get creative, like this ugly snippet: