![]() ![]() In the Night School example above, both characters are male, so Child uses “Reacher” rather than “he” in the dialogue tag. The subject is straightforward: generally you will be choosing between using a character’s name and using a pronoun (he, she). Now, let’s look more closely at the basic components of a dialogue tag. When in doubt, include the dialogue tag because you never want your reader to have to scan back up a page to figure out who is speaking. Even so, Child doesn’t go more than half a dozen turns before adding a dialogue tag. ![]() In this scene, Jack Reacher is the one asking questions, and the unnamed “guy” is the one answering them, which helps us keep track of whose line is whose. Apparently the motor pool got a requisition.” Army NCOs have the world’s most efficient grapevine. The guy shook his hand and kept hold of his elbow, and said, “I hear you’re getting new orders.” See, for example, this exchange from the opening pages of Lee Child’s Night School: If there are just two speaking characters in a scene, you can let a few lines bounce back and forth between them without including the tags. If you have more than two characters in a scene, and all of them are speaking, each line will need a dialogue tag, unless some internal clue clearly identifies the speaker. In this example, Jane is the subject, said is the verb, and Jane said is the dialogue tag. “Sometimes I have dreams about Sriracha,” Jane said. Now, let’s zero in on the dialogue tag and investigate what it is, how it works, and how you can use it to best effect in your fiction.Ī dialogue tag refers to the subject and verb that identify who is speaking. ![]() We covered the basics of punctuating dialogue in a previous post, covering when to use a comma between a dialogue line and a dialogue tag and when to use a period, as well as how to treat dialogue lines that end in an ellipsis or dash. ![]()
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