How to Write Dialogue Attribution
A primer about tags, beats, and everything in between.
Dialogue is the beating heart of storytelling and getting it right is key to being a good writer. Part of getting it right involves making sure the reader isn’t confused about who is speaking.
We do that with dialogue attribution.
When it’s done right, dialogue attribution is nearly invisible to the reader. It blends in and doesn’t assert itself at all. It doesn’t make the reader stop and think about what’s going on. It doesn’t break the flow of the story in any way.
When it’s not done right, dialogue attribution is clunky. It reads like a laundry list of characters. Or like the author broke out their thesaurus and looked up every possible word to use other than ‘said’ or ‘asked.’ Or it’s a Swiftian mess of people speaking with weird adverbs. (She said, obviously.)
We want to do it right, of course. So let’s start with some vocabulary.
Dialogue attribution: A fancy way of labeling the words attached to a line of dialogue that let the reader know who is speaking. Dialogue tags and beats are both examples of dialogue attribution.
