"I said"

One of my biggest problems when writing stories is dialogue. I always wind up going into a constant loop of:

"Hi" he said

"Hi" she said

"Are you alright?" he said back, worried

Not really, I can't stop thinking about it." she said

Does anyone have any advice on how to avoid this? I'm trying to write a story and I'm already running into this problem.

There are a lot of other words to signal speaking, like asked, inferred, replied, responded, supplied, agreed, argued, protested, complained, screamed, chuckled, sneered, mumbled, et cetera. Just be creative with it.

For me, sometimes I don't use a dialogue tag and instead indicated an action after someone speaks. Like this:

"You all right?" Jack shot her a worried look.

"Not really, to be honest." Sighing, Hanna hung her head down in defeat.

Aisu already mentioned there are other dialogue tags, and he's right that you should be creative when using those dialogue tags.

I try to combine what the two above do. It adds more variety.

Edit: Also try not to be heavy on dialogue at all if you can.

A lot of what I write is scenes purely based on dialogue, so I try to circumvent this by not using dialogue tags too often. If two characters are heavily engaged in conversation, just let it flow, and it'll stay clear who is speaking. The dialogue tags only need to be present at the start of the conversation to show the reader who is speaking. Once the conversation gets going, I tend to do what Bay advised, and that is use action as a dialogue tag instead, to add life to the conversation.

If there's a group of people talking, don't feel bad about using said. It's an almost invisible word. Using synonyms for the word draws attention to it, and it's only really useful to use another word to add a shade of meaning. Using whispered instead of said if something is being whispered feels fine to me, but using opined and implored feels immersion breaking. I usually treat said as the exemption on the repetition rule, meaning that while you don't want to repeat most words too often, said's fine to keep using. Of course, there are situations where it becomes annoying, and I personally find that is when it falls into a rhythmic usage. Short spoken sentences usually create stuff like this.

"How are you?" she said

"I'm good," Mark said

"Great to hear," she said

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For me, it's only in writing like that said starts to feel wrong.

This reminds me of an article or a blog post, I can't remember what it was exactly, of a writer I once read about using 'said', where he talked about how people should never use synonyms for it. He said that every connotation about how something should be interpreted should be clear from the dialogue and the scene itself. I don't necessarily agree with that, but it's an interesting perspective.

Ice said:

This reminds me of an article or a blog post, I can't remember what it was exactly, of a writer I once read about using 'said', where he talked about how people should never use synonyms for it. He said that every connotation about how something should be interpreted should be clear from the dialogue and the scene itself. I don't necessarily agree with that, but it's an interesting perspective.

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It's definitely a weird perspective, and I kind of get what he was going for, but I can't help but think it's the wrong way to go about things. If writing becomes to repetitive like that it stops being interesting, even if the story and dialogue are great, and it feels more like a list than prose.

Like others have said, I'm an advocate of leaving the tags out when it makes sense. Bardrothen's first example set above demonstrates how you can establish who's speaking and give a better description of the whole scene at the same time. It's a terrific way to help the reader visualize the scene and avoid the repetition of "said, said, said."

At the same time, it's not bad in itself to use "he/she said." A great example of using it appropriately I think is actually in the first line of Bardrothen's second example set. There the "he said" acts as pseudo-punctuation. It breaks up the two sentences and I think gives each of them a touch more gravity, especially with how "It'll be a hundred dollars an hour" stands alone now. That's how you should view "he/she said," as pseudo-punctuation. You don't want to use a ton of them in rapid succession for the same reason you don't want to use a ton of short, one-clause sentences in a row, like "He opened the door. Then he walked out of his house. Then he looked both ways. Then he crossed the street." It's repetitive, and you have more tools at your disposal to control the pace and tone of your scene.

As for synonyms, I think where people really run into trouble with them is when the choice of synonym doesn't convey any information you couldn't infer from the dialogue itself. Here's an obvious example:

"Please, please don't hurt me," he pleaded.

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We know he's pleading already, of course. And here's a particularly egregious example from an actual bestselling novel. (Bonus points to whoever can guess which one it is!)

Aro started to laugh. "Ha, ha, ha," he chuckled.

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Contrast this with something like this, which I think is an acceptable use of synonyms:

Kate was enraptured with my interesting story, but then something behind me caught her attention. "Hey, Jake!" she called out.

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Here I'm using "called out" instead of "said" to convey with economy that Jake is somewhere in the distance and maybe hasn't noticed her yet. If I had used "said," the reader might assume instead that Jake is right behind me and was maybe already joining us without my knowing. Of course I could probably get a similar effect without a tag and describing a bit more action, like maybe she stood up and waved, but in this case I prefer the economy and that's okay.

I think the main takeaway should be that said-tags, synonym-tags, and no-tags-at-all are all normal parts of English writing and there's no absolute rule against using any of them, neither in grammar nor style. When evaluating a passage of dialogue, your reason against the choice of tags/omission of tags shouldn't be "Because 'said' is bad," or "Because synonyms are bad." Rather you should cite evidence of an undesirable effect, like "Because it's repetitive," "Because it's overwrought," or "Because I can't tell who's talking." Figure out what works on a case-by-case basis.

Bardothren said:

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Don't get me wrong, I don't claim to be the expert on how one should write anything - especially dialogue which is by far the weakest aspect of my writing. Although I guess I'll bite xD. In this instance, I think that the first was the best. You weren't using any of the additions to convey tone or anything so it wasn't really necessary whilst not using any description of the actions actually conjured up an image of a more "professional" atmosphere. Of the three though, the one where you just repeated "said" every time was the most monotonous to read.

icomeanon6 said:

Aro started to laugh. "Ha, ha, ha," he chuckled.

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Breaking Dawn or something along those lines. Where's my prize? {XD} But in all serious you've made a good point with the whole thing being a situational matter.