Dialogue Tag Options Other Than "Said"

Dialogue Tag Options Other Than "Said"

Writing "said" repeatedly in creative writing projects isn't necessarily bad. "Said" can be an excellent tool to support the flow of your prose. It can function like picture frames on a wall. It adds to your manuscript, but your readers may only read the whole dialogue tag occasionally.

Still, there can definitely be times when "said" gets used too many times in a row. Descriptive dialogue tags can add tension, variety, and depth to crucial moments in your manuscript.

Need a creative boost? Here's an extensive list of dialogue tag options besides "said."

Dialogue Tag Alternatives to "Said"

Acknowledged

Added

Agonized

Agreed

Announced

Apologized

Approved

Articulated

Asserted

Babbled

Backtracked

Bawled

Beamed

Began

Blubbered

Blurted

Bubbled

Called

Chattered

Cheered

Chimed in

Chortled

Chuckled

Commented

Communicated

Conferred

Congratulated

Complimented

Considered

Contended

Cried

Crooned

Declared

Denoted

Drawled

Elaborated

Emitted

Ended

Enunciated

Exclaimed

Expounded

Expressed

Giggled

Greeted

Grinned

Groaned

Gushed

Interjected

Jabbered

Joked

Laughed

Mentioned

Moaned

Mumbled

Noted

Observed

Orated

Persisted

Praised

Predicted

Pronounced

Quipped

Recited

Reckoned

Rejoiced

Related

Remarked

Repeated

Replied

Responded

Sang

Screeched

Shared

Slurred

Stated

Smiled

Snarled

Spat

Suggested

Swore

Thanked

Tittered

Told

Trilled

Urged

Uttered

Yammered

Yelled

Vocalized

Voiced

Other Helpful Resources

Need more inspiration? Here are a few other sources you can check out:

350 Other Words Than Said

Different Words to Use Instead of Said

500 Dialogue Tags Examples

Should You Always Use Dialogue Tags?

You don't have to! Conversations often happen in all genres of creative writing without constant dialogue tags. Once you establish who's saying what, you can format a conversation like this:

"You don't know what you're talking about," Joe said.

"Of course I do," Lucy replied, rolling her eyes. "I only got a Ph. D. in Chemistry."

"From one of the worst universities in the country."

"It's still accredited."

"Your thesis advisor was just arrested for academic fraud!"

"And yet I still passed all my finals."

You can keep up with who's saying what and the tone behind their voices without a tag for each line of dialogue. I wouldn't recommend doing that with every conversation (especially extensive ones) but you can take a break from tags if people are talking rapidly back and forth or if you just want to take a break.

---

You'll know how to handle dialogue tags and descriptors as you practice. Reading your manuscript out loud can also point out when they're clunky or unnecessary. There's a necessary balance to making tags that you'll find more easily with each draft!

More Posts from Hazyirbis-blog and Others

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I'm The One Who Ruined Me: I Did It Myself
I'm The One Who Ruined Me: I Did It Myself
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I'm The One Who Ruined Me: I Did It Myself
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I'm The One Who Ruined Me: I Did It Myself

I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself

No Longer Human // Ask Polly: Help, I'm The Loneliest Person In The World! // Franz Kafka // Sue Zhao // Fingertips - Fortesa Latifi // Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky // Juansen Dizon // The Garden of Eden - Ernest Hemingway // On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

1 year ago

Amazing and Heartbreaking

WHAT LURKS BENEATH Comic

It's the spooky season...! To celebrate, please enjoy this 7-page horror comic featuring Brook that I made for "WHAT LURKS BENEATH", a One Piece horror zine full of incredible talent. After sales are only open until the end of October so please consider checking it out and grabbing a digital copy absolutely PACKED with amazing art & stories, and some of the nicest merch I've seen from a zine!

The Thousand Sunny is silhouetted against a stormy sea. Brook: "Stormy seas and dark clouds are no cause to frown - come pick your noise-maker and let's boogie down!" Usopp with a banjo: "Be real with us Brook, something doesn't make sense!" Chopper with a flute: "Do you swear you can play all these wild instruments?" Brook: "Cross my heart hope to die, were there one to be found- though it's not half as hard as you're making it sound. Given time any bonehead can learn any part, and time did I have on that grim Thriller Bark; Always gloomy, no sun, nor a moon, scarcely rain, so! To mark passing days I decided I'd train. I pledged I would master the tools of my crew-!" He stage-whispers to the boys: "Though step number one was divining who's who." In a flashback, Brook plays a wind instrument by a skeleton. "Clarinet means it's Charlie; Oboe, and it's Chet." He plays a note. "An old English horn? But that means..." He shakes the skeleton and yells, "Bernadette!?"
Brook borrows Chopper's flute. "I practiced and practiced, and practiced some more! Every tune I knew soon back to front without flaw." He dances while playing the flute. "Fingers worked to the bone til I couldn't deny;" he pauses, arms lowering. Fog has started to enter his frame. "I had learned all I could. It was time for goodbye." He looks down at a long-haired skeleton in a tattered dress. "I'd retire each piece with its player below." Brook's words appear on a sheet of music paper along with shadows of his bony hands tying strings around a wide variety of instruments. He has now tied the flute to the skeleton with a red string and carries her through the fog and drops her over the side of the ship into the ocean. In the present day, Sanji and Robin watch in perturbed silence. Brook continues - "Though it seemed to these eyes not all wanted to go." A haunted long-haired face blending skeleton and flesh takes one last fearful look at Brook as it sinks below the waves.
Brook gazes emptily down against a foggy sky. "As captain, I ought to have joined them." Several bony hands appear to claw at him from the choppy sea. "I stayed. Like the piper in convoy of rats, on I played, and prayed to the devil whose fruit I'd dared eat, 'If I'm never to wake from this dream, may I sleep?'" He imagines himself as a human again, trapped on the ocean floor, straddled by the skeleton of his old captain Yorki who taunts him with his own violin, other skeletan crewmates and band members dancing behind them amongst coral and seaweed like orange licking flames. "But I feared I would pay tenfold more if I tried it, in the dark, and the deep, and the deafening..."
"Quiet." Brook alone is in the same position as before, now a skeleton pinned to the ocean floor by his devil fruit, his tattered violin resting on his chest. The seaweed is inky black around him and the darkness of the composition surrounds the singular word "quiet", emphasising how utterly alone he is. The panel fades into his tattered shoes and legs standing on the railing of his old ship, violin held loosely in his hand, the torn sails flapping amidst the fog surrounding him and obscuring almost everything. "But I waited. And waited. For what, I can't say."
Technicolour panels overlay different sections of Brook's skull, showing what expressions he might be showing if he still had a face; a forehead wrinkled in agony, eyes wide in a thousand yard stare, cheeks split in laughter, a chin dimpled and streaked with tears; "In that miserable twilight between night and day. No world beyond fog, nothing left that could prove -" A singular panel cutting back to the present day shows Nami, Luffy, Usopp, and Zoro all watching him with varying looks of apprehension and horror, but Brook continues unbothered - "If I wasn't some needle left spun in its groove!" In Brook's memory he turns around and sees a figure emerging through the fog; as he recognises it as Yorki his flesh seems to return and he jumps down from the railing back to the deck, running towards him with joy; "Words heard on the wind, in an endless refrain."
Brook breaks through the fog on the ghost ship into a clearing of rain that immediately soaks through his clothes and breaks his illusion, returning him to a skeleton. In the present day, too, Brook is also silent, contemplative, everyone else watching him. He remembers looking up at the drops pouring from the sky under the torn sails of the Dutchman, and looks out the Thousand Sunny's port hole at the storm, tapping the flute against the glass. "Forgive me, I err," he says.
A double-page spread finishes the comic on a single shot of Brook soaked in the storm back on the Dutchman and he finishes his poem - "On occasion, it rained." Water is pooling and spilling from his empty eye sockets and down his skull to give the impression that he's crying, even though he has lost the ability to actually emote as such.

Tags
1 week ago

WEBSITES FOR WRITERS {masterpost}

E.A. Deverell - FREE worksheets (characters, world building, narrator, etc.) and paid courses;

Hiveword - Helps to research any topic to write about (has other resources, too);

BetaBooks - Share your draft with your beta reader (can be more than one), and see where they stopped reading, their comments, etc.;

Charlotte Dillon - Research links;

Writing realistic injuries - The title is pretty self-explanatory: while writing about an injury, take a look at this useful website;

One Stop for Writers - You guys... this website has literally everything we need: a) Description thesaurus collection, b) Character builder, c) Story maps, d) Scene maps & timelines, e) World building surveys, f) Worksheets, f) Tutorials, and much more! Although it has a paid plan ($90/year | $50/6 months | $9/month), you can still get a 2-week FREE trial;

One Stop for Writers Roadmap - It has many tips for you, divided into three different topics: a) How to plan a story, b) How to write a story, c) How to revise a story. The best thing about this? It's FREE!

Story Structure Database - The Story Structure Database is an archive of books and movies, recording all their major plot points;

National Centre for Writing - FREE worksheets and writing courses. Has also paid courses;

Penguin Random House - Has some writing contests and great opportunities;

Crime Reads - Get inspired before writing a crime scene;

The Creative Academy for Writers - "Writers helping writers along every step of the path to publication." It's FREE and has ZOOM writing rooms;

Reedsy - "A trusted place to learn how to successfully publish your book" It has many tips, and tools (generators), contests, prompts lists, etc. FREE;

QueryTracker - Find agents for your books (personally, I've never used this before, but I thought I should feature it here);

Pacemaker - Track your goals (example: Write 50K words - then, everytime you write, you track the number of the words, and it will make a graphic for you with your progress). It's FREE but has a paid plan;

Save the Cat! - The blog of the most known storytelling method. You can find posts, sheets, a software (student discount - 70%), and other things;

I hope this is helpful for you!

(Also, check my gumroad store if you want to!)

1 week ago

someone recommend me some good fantasy books that aren’t centred on a war, please, my crops are dying

9 months ago

Fic which focuses on Alfred’s reaction to Jason. He looks like he loves him and he feels like he loves him but when the chips are down Alfred does the necessary thing and walks over his dead grandson’s memory in order to keep his living son functioning. He judges and criticizes Bruce in the privacy of his mind but outwardly he comforts Bruce that there was never anything he could’ve done for the boy, he brought it upon himself. The living must move on peace must be upheld the hatchet must be buried. Alfred nobly grieves dishonestly, until he believes it too. (It’s not very hard.)

And then Jason comes back. He tears at the seams of Bruce that Alfred (and Dick and Tim) so nobly stitched back together. He says no the living need to look, this peace isn’t real, the hatchet is all we have.

And what can Alfred do except continue the lie? What can he do except continue to bury bury bury Jason in a distorted past? Jason is his grandson but Bruce was his son first. Bruce was here. Bruce. Takes precedence. He’s already made his choice. There is no way but forward. He can’t look back.

8 months ago

unsung benefit i think a lot of ppl are sleeping on with using the public library is that i think its a great replacement for the dopamine hit some ppl get from online shopping. it kind of fills that niche of reserving something that you then get to anticipate the arrival of and enjoy when it arrives, but without like, the waste and the money.

7 months ago

Naruto and Sasuke daily life

2 weeks ago

this is one of the best visual representations of classical music i’ve ever seen

1 week ago

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

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