: Re: Writing compelling dialogue I try to avoid repeating the prosaic "he said", "she said" structure as much as possible when writing dialogue. But I think overload of complex descriptors "he articulated",

@Dunderdale623

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Surprisingly, dialogue tags are language-specific. In English, 'said' is considered transparent, the dialogue tag to be used most of the time, as opposed to "intoned", "articulated" etc., which are to be used sparingly. In French, on the other hand, using "said" all the time is considered to show lack of creativity, and a multitude of dialogue tags are commonly used.

Here Monica Celio points out that if it's clear who is speaking, no dialogue tag is necessary at all. How is that achieved? In a scene with only two characters, it is fairly easy - first one, than the other, back and forth. With more characters, other hints can be used: one character might address another by name, for example.

However, for a dialogue scene to work, we need to be in the scene, not drift away into a flashback mid-sentence. Think of a scene as one melody: you can develop it, take it slowly or suddenly from one mood to another. But you can't jump from Bach to Queen, then back to Bach like Queen never happened. It becomes a confused mess. It's hard for a reader to follow such jumps. And even if a reader makes the cerebral effort to follow what's going on, emotionally - you've lost him.

The thing is, a scene has a pacing. We imagine things as they happen on page. We imagine them at normal speed, or the author might fast-forward, or slow-motion particular moments. I sometimes use dialogue tags to fiddle with pacing:

"Well," he said, "I think this is what we should do."

reads differently from

"Well, I think this is what we should do" he said.

But imagine if in the middle of a dialogue scene, a movie jumped into a different scene, then back into the dialogue, then out... What would that do to the scene's pacing? I think that's what @Wetcircuit is trying to say.

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