Improve your dialogue with one simple hack

Writing dialogue – either you love it or hate it.  No matter how you feel about it, I wanted to give you a super quick hack to make your scenes with dialogue read better.

What's this trick? Get rid of the attributions.

Dialogue attributions are things like “he said,” “she said,” “I remarked,” “the man explained.” Using a lot of attributions bogs your text down. 

Let me first give you an example of what not to do. 

“Are you going to order the extra spicy?” I asked. 
“I'm thinking about it,” Milton said.
“Last time it gave you acid reflux,” I added.
“Yeah, but I hadn't eaten all day,” he explained. 
“I just don't want to hear you complain about how much your stomach is hurting you,” I remarked. 

I asked. Milton said. I added. He explained.  I find reading all of those attributions a bit annoying. 

However, simply getting rid of them isn’t the answer either. How will your reader know who is saying what? Below are three fixes that allow you to remove most of all of your attributions that still let your reader understand who is speaking.

TIP NUMBER ONE: Only put in attributions in the first line of dialogue for each character.

In the dialogue below, I really only need the attributions once. After that, it’s easy to figure out who is speaking.

“Are you going to order the extra spicy?” I asked. 
“I'm thinking about it.” Milton said.
“Last time it gave you acid reflux.”
“Yeah, but I hadn't eaten all day.”

TIP NUMBER TWO: Use the character’s name in the line of dialogue. If there are only two characters in your scene, it immediately becomes obvious who is speaking.

“Are you going to order the extra spicy, Milton?” 
“I'm thinking about it, Marge.” 
“Last time it gave you acid reflux”.
“Yeah, but I hadn't eaten all day.”

TIP NUMBER THREE: My favorite way of getting rid of attributions is to replace them with an insight about the character or yourself.

Let's take this first line of dialogue:

“Are you going to order the extra spicy?” I asked.

Now replace “I asked” with something like “I tried to make my questions sound casual, not like I was nagging. Milton hated it when I started telling him what to do.”

It's very obvious who’s speaking because the line of dialogue is followed by a sentence that starts with the word “I,” so I am the one speaking. 

Here is an example of how to do this with the second line of dialogue:

BEFORE: “I'm thinking about it,” Milton said.

AFTER: “I’m thinking about it.” Milton looked at the menu more intently now, but I could tell he was just pretending. He already knew what he planned on ordering.

It's obvious who’s speaking. We know it's Milton because I followed the line of dialogue with a sentence about what the character is doing at that moment. So now, not only is it clear who is speaking, we are now getting information that serves to make the scene richer.


Hope this helps! Wishing you happy writing.