Characters come alive when they speak. We learn more about characters from their speech and about other characters they interact with and comment on. Show, don’t tell. Dialogue can also effectively advance the plot and provide backstory information more convincingly than narration.
There is a huge range of reporting verbs, said being the most common and most preferred, the default setting, if you like. There is really no need to employ a range of reporting verbs for the sake of variety. Said tends to become invisible in the flow of dialogue.
Similarly there is a huge range of adverbs that can be appended to reporting verbs. For example: … she exclaimed excitedly, …he complained bitterly. Parsimonious use of adjectives is generally advised for descriptive writing and likewise for adverbs, which are frequently appended to the reporting verb, often unnecessarily, but there is a case for denoting the attitude of the speaker. In this dialogue from Maurice Shadbolt’s historical novel, Monday’s Warriors, for example:
“You might,” he judged, “have been one of the buggers who shot my Dad.”
“Yes,” Hamiora said, miserably.
Miserably denotes the remorse, regret and discomfort felt by Hamiora.
In my novel Journeys, Annie the maid tries to avoid a chore that would take her into the room of the predatory Mr Robert.
Annie found Brian in the coal cellar and asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking charge of Mr Robert’s room.
“And what will you do for me?” he said slyly.
“I’ll tell your Ma what a good boy you are,” she said, just as slyly.
The adverb slyly suggests an indecent proposition from Brian and then a veiled threat from Annie.
Minimalists and most contemporary writers most often use the plain … he said, …she said, in dialogue, even with questions, rather than …he asked. For example:
“Where are you going?” she said.
“Just to the shop,’ he said, “to get some cigarettes.”
Placing the he said within the reported speech, as above, is also a common practice. The speech tag may be placed between sentences or between clauses, or at least between chunks of meaning. To illustrate the effect of not doing so, I refer to dialogue again in Monday’s Warriors.
“There have,” he said, “been six years of war. What does six say?”
To my ear, the alternative: “There have been six years of war,” he said. “What does six say?” has a better flow.
Shadbolt frequently inserts the speech tag after the first one or two words of the dialogue, as in the following examples.
“I,” Big Hiroki warned, “watch you for him.”
“Where,” she asked her daughter, “have you been?”
“Do you,” Titoki asked Kimball, detect error?”
I would opt for the conventional attribution at the end of short utterances, especially when the it is extended with an adverbial phrase, as in:
“What,” Many Birds asked with irritation, “does that palisading look like to you, captain?”
Shadbolt employs a variety of the great range of reporting verbs alluded to above, where in most instances said would serve as well. A sample from Monday’s Warriors: observed, offered, allowed, judged, suggested, confirmed, disclosed, revealed, announced, diagnosed, confessed.
Shadbolt’s characters also speak quite eloquently, compared with the dialogue of Hemingway, for example. We have seen in The Killers, how mundane, even inarticulate much of the dialogue is. Some of Hemingway’s characters have been referred to as a type of dumb ox.
Shadbolt’s characters in Monday’s Warriors, are quite articulate, including all of the Māori characters, at a time in history when the indigenous people of New Zealand would typically have had quite limited English. His main Māori characters, actual historical figures, learned English from Christian missionaries, and this is mentioned in the novel. The main Māori character, the infamous Titokowaru, speaks to the infamous American Kimble Bent as follows:
“Interesting,” the Māori said. “I once sailed to California with a cargo of potatoes and corn. San Francisco, I consider an amicable place. If I had a second life I should be an American. Even now I wouldn’t say no.”
Even incidental Māori characters speak in eloquent English.
“The British?” Titoko asked.
“Lost also,” the horseman said. “They thought to follow my people up into the mountain forest. They now pick a fight with the mountain. It defies them as no human can. Presently they seek guns fallen down ravines and sup poorly on their own horses.”
Yes/no questions occur frequently and naturally in the dialogues but are almost always followed by oblique answers. I counted only a few nos and no yeses.
To Kimball he said, “So they are to push inland?”
“The way I heard told.”
“Do you detect error?”
“It’s holy enough.”
“Is that a fault?”
“A little goes a long way.”
The oblique response to a yes/no question can be a good technique, if not overdone. It could be a speech habit of one character.
Shadbolt tells a good story with an eloquent narrative, and with regard to dialogue, he opts for eloquence over veracity, in all three of his New Zealand Wars Trilogy.
As noted, in the discussion of Journey it is not always necessary to keep repeating the attributions when it is clear from context who the speaker is. Also, as noted previously, Patricia Grace reports extended passages of dialogue without speech tags.
Another technique, in lieu of attribution, is the action beat – a description of what the character is doing at or around the time of speaking. Examples:
She opened the door and peered out into the darkness. “Who’s there?”
He stood up and lost his balance. “I get dizzy spells.”
A character’s comments are sometimes indirectly attributed by denoting the speaker also as a listener, as though the comment was made unconsciously or unintentionally, as in: he heard himself say…
Tom Scott uses this technique in his memoir Drawn Out, with his typically self-deprecating humour. He recounts an exchange with the fearsome Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, with whom he had a particularly acrimonious relationship.
Muldoon ran into Scott in a corridor at parliament and said: “I read your article Mr Scott. I didn’t know you could write.”
Scott reports his reply, as near as I can recall, as: “A voice not my own, from somewhere said, “I didn’t know you could read.””