: Re: Putting a dialogue a tag before a quote Sometimes I see stuff like this: X said, "..." "..." X did this, and then said, "..." Is it used to just vary sentence structure? Or to

@Pierce369

Vote Up Vote Down

I use non-conversation bits to show where pauses or lulls in the conversation occur. They can be short, like:

"Hey," said Bob.

"Hey yourself."

"So..." Bob started and then cleared his throat. This was only my third week on the job but I knew even at that early date that when Bob cleared his throat, he had something truly stupid to say. "Do you have those TPS reports?"

I stared at Bob incredulously. What did he think this was, Office Space? "No, Bob, I do not have them. Perhaps they got lost in the year 1998."

Hopefully that first one demonstrated a little awkward pause while the main character thought up a (semi) witty response. You can also make them longer:

"Nancy, what do you think of the global dilemma?"

Patricia was always asking Nancy stupid questions like this. She was soooo dumb. If she really wanted an answer, couldn't she just look it up on like Wikipedia or something? Maybe she could ask Jeeves. Oh my god! Was Ask Jeeves even still around? Maybe Jeeves had been replaced by a younger, hunkier guy named like Falco or something. No, that was stupid; computers don't get old and only rich guys ever used Ask Jeeves so they'd probably always want some fake old butler dude.

"Nancy, are you even listening to me?"

You can just add he said/she said to the end of each line; in fact, your readers will generally get the hang of it after an exchange or two (especially if your dialogue is strong enough) and you really don't need to add any tags at all. The thing about doing that is, it makes the conversation feel like a high-speed, no-pause madcap comedy style banter (think: Gilmore Girls), and if your characters are just talking about what went on that day at school it's going to feel a bit off. Additionally, there becomes a risk of making the characters seem like disembodied talking heads if you keep it up for too long.

One little trick you can do - that I recommend doing for dialogue in general - is on your subsequent drafts, go in and read it out loud. For one thing, in my experience this really roots out any inauthentic sounding verbiage, sentences that are too long to be said within one breath, and so on. For another, I think that with dialogue in particular you get a pretty good sense of how long those filled pauses occur. In real life, people say "um" and "ah" a lot; readers won't like you to drop those in (unless you want to portray a dullard) but they do kind of expect the "pause" side of the filled pause.

(0)

Login to post a comment!