Speech Tags

One of the most common dilemmas of any writer involves the word “said.” Many new writers try to avoid it at all costs, believing that any speaking verb is better than the dull “said.” While it would be dull indeed for every character to say everything, you can go too far the other way and end up with exchanges like the following example.

“How did this happen?” asked Joe.

“I couldn’t see what I was doing!” exclaimed Beth.

“Is it really so hard to read the instructions?” queried Joe.

“Yeah! They’re not in Braille, dummy!” hollered Beth.

Obviously, there are plenty of ways to liven up this conversation or make it easier to read, but the first thing that jumps out is this (fictional) writer’s desperate need to avoid “said.” “Said” is actually such a common speech tag that most readers’ brains don’t register it. If you pepper in non-“said” words judiciously, it’ll spice things up without getting silly.

Less Is More
You can’t use “said” constantly, but if you switch it up too often your writing style can be distracting. What’re you supposed to do? Try this

“How did this happen?” asked Joe.

“I couldn’t see what I was doing!” exclaimed Beth.

“Is it really so hard to read the instructions?”

“Yeah! They’re not in Braille, dummy!”

When two characters chat, you don’t have to tag every line. Readers of most ages would be able to follow that conversation and know that each new line is a response to the previous one (and therefore spoken by the other person). This approach can get more confusing if there are more than two people speaking, but it’s still very handy.

Action Beats
Something else to remember is the importance of action beats or pauses in dialogue. These beats can be a character performing an action or interacting with their environment. Without action beats, your characters can feel less grounded in reality, like they’ve ascended into another realm during the conversation. In comic strips, they call it talking heads.

Even if your characters are floating in a featureless void in a scene, people still move. They scratch their noses, flip their hair, rub their rings, check their watches, and otherwise fidget. You can also use action beats to describe facial expressions, narrate inner monologue, or relate observations.

Watch how adding action beats either instead of or in addition to speech tags grounds this scene in the story.

“How did this happen?” Joe coughed as the remainder of the smoke wafted out the window.

“I couldn’t see what I was doing!” exclaimed Beth, fumbling to take off her now-unnecessary oven mitts.

“Is it really so hard to read the instructions?” For God’s sake, they were right there.

“Yeah! They’re not in Braille, dummy!” Joe stared at Beth’s dark glasses, as familiar as his hands, and wondered how he’d ever forgotten.
 
Not a Speech Tag
This may sound obvious, but a verb needs to make noise in order to be a speech tag. Plenty of writers, regardless of experience, have a tendency to use certain words as speech tags that make no sense. One example is the word “smiled.” As in

“Sure thing,” she smiled.

The way that sentence is punctuated implies NOT that she said something while smiling (possible) but that the act of smiling emitted physical sound (impossible). “Shrugged” is another one I see a lot. Shrugging doesn’t inherently make noise so it can’t be a speech tag. The silent verbs you can use confidently are things like “mouthed,” “mimed,” “signed,” or “gestured.”

Sometimes, authors pick words that technically convey a sound, but may be impractical for that particular dialogue. Say you have a character giving a long, drawn out explanation of something. If you use the speech tag “exhaled,” that wouldn’t make any sense. People only exhale for so long and multi-line dialogue would take longer to say.