Alternative Dialogue Tags

by Julian Mithra

Don’t you get bored of reading dramatic dialogue with nothing but “he said,” “said she,” or “they said ”? Jazz up your dialogue with this tagging inspo!

>Mood. Let out your inner brat to pick a fight. Intensify non-existent conflict between characters with hyperbolic tags like gaslighted, pressed, insisted, overrode, huffed, stonewalled, and for the opposer, mollified, coddled, fawned, wavered.

>Postmodern. It’s terribly compliant to continue to mark your dialogue with outré “quotation marks,” the name of the speaker, and fluff like adverbs. By not indicating or ascribing any speech, you’ll be at the forefront of the avant garde.

>Tom Swifties. “Shoot for the stars and you’ll reach the moon,” they wheezed breathlessly.

>Wet. Our speech organs are wet. Use descriptions that emphasize the relationship between talking and moisture, such as spat, vomited, ejaculated, slobbered, and steamed.

>Gesture. A reader will appreciate details that permit them to imagine the characters moving in space. Will your beekeeper squirt a bit of smoke when she gets nervous? A racehorse breeder might fiddle with chess pieces, while a romantic interest continually stirs their tea without ever taking a sip.

>Animal calls. By anthropomorphizing animals, we have shared understandings of their core personality, like busy beavers and stubborn donkeys. Choose an animal to match your character and let them roar, chirp, hiss, bleat, low, cry, wail, screech, or honk. I wouldn’t recommend ribbet, gobble, or ultrasonic emission.

#3 Create a society that’s just really messed up.

Every morning, the veil sparks to life like a generator. The sound precedes the color by only a few moments, it emits a harsh grind as it tries in vain to live up to legend. The village, rigid, that once prospered along the New England coastline sits desolate as at the end of the war. Thus, only one cottage, red clay constructed, persists its practice of inhabitance in the face of the breach that broke the world. At dawn, when the magenta light crawls across the border of the little town, a foul stench begins to permeate the vacant air as the vacuum beyond removes all that remains. By the time the light of the fading sun reaches the north side of town, where the remaining Mr. and Ms. Wrights continue to eke out