: Re: I'm getting tired of "he said" "she said" in dialogue; how do I get around it? I get tired of "he said", "she said", "they replied". Is there a better, but still reasonable way, to indicate

@Kaufman555

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My personal preference: omit the "he said" / "she said" entirely. You will need it when there is the slightest possibility that who is speaking is unclear, but otherwise there is no need for it. If you wind up with a stretch of dialogue so long that it's easy to lose track of who is speaking, that's a sign that your dialogue needs to be cut down or broken up by action anyway.

But you have to do it carefully. One book that does it wrong is "And Another Thing" by Eoin Colfer, or at least my edition of it. I was confused about who was speaking on more than one occasion, because he (or his editor) didn't apply the following rules:

If a character is the subject of some description (say, performing an action), and the character then speaks, then his line of dialogue goes in the same paragraph as the description. In such a case, no "he said" is needed because, if it were somebody else, there would be a paragraph break.
If, however, you just finished describing what Joe does and then Jane speaks, Jane's line goes in a new paragraph and should include "she said" or "said Jane" for clarity.

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