by Dan Holloway

When I was at college my best friend and later best man at my wedding used to read through rainforests’ worth  of my stories with a red pen, a critical eye, and infinite patience. He would say all kinds of interesting things about characters and structure before circling in on the inevitable conclusion, “You can’t write dialogue for toffee.”

That was 20 years ago. I still tease him about giving me a complex for life. Which he did. I must have devoted more hours to figuring out dialogue than every other part of writing put together. Now quite possibly I still “can’t write dialogue for toffee.” On the other hand, I’ve learned, forgotten, relearned, and messed around with more rules than there are toppings on my favourite pizza.

If I had just one piece of advice on dialogue it would be to think how you use tags, the simple he said/she said stuff. You know, those little bits that get in the way.

We know what tags are for – they’re there to stop us getting lost. They’re most definitely not there to showcase our verbal flair. He didn’t say it empathically; she didn’t ululate the words. She said it. He asked it. And only so many times as is necessary to stop you going “Eh? Who was that?”

That’s the rule. We know it. But we’re wordsmiths. It does seem a shame to have words that don’t really add anything to the language, doesn’t it?

Consider this piece of dialogue.

Pete: “When did you stop loving me?”

Kelly: “I think it was the night our daughter died.”

Now I imagine the rules would tell us to present it like this:

Pete looked Kelly straight in the eye and through his tears he asked her, “When did you stop loving me?”

“I think it was the night our daughter died.”

We don’t need “she said” at all. Only. Well, the scene is flat. It doesn’t breathe. Now the clunky but conventional way of adding tension would be to say:

She hesitated for a moment, looked away, and answered...

Or some such.

But that’s stage direction, and we’re not writing a film, we’re writing a book. So consider this:

Pete looked Kelly straight in the eye and through his tears he asked her, “When did you stop loving me?”

She said, “I think it was the night our daughter died.”

Or

Pete looked Kelly straight in the eye and through his tears he asked her, “When did you stop loving me?”

“I think,” she said, “it was the night our daughter died.”

You see what’s happened. That simple dialogue tag has added a breathing space, a rhythm as we read. In the first instance it does exactly what the rather clumsy stage direction did – it lets us know there is a pause, it lets us feel the awkwardness in Kelly’s voice. In the second example, it creates tension. It’s a pause. We’re there with Pete wondering what she’s going to say. We’re there with Kelly wondering if we can bring ourselves to say it. And like a well-timed pause in a rock song (next time you’re on YouTube listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana were masters of this), it adds more impact to what comes next.

I see the question, “Where should I put the tag?” on writing forums all the time. The answer is, until you’re happy with it, stick to the end of the dialogue. Once you are comfortable enough with constructing conversations on the page, you can move to where it should really go – the place where it will add most to the rhythm and tension of the scene – and you’ll find that by using tags judiciously to break up a scene you can cut out whole chunks of filler description that lifts the reader out of the scene, detracting from rather than adding to the tension and dynamic that every conversation should have.   ~BE
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