Dialogue tags in first person8/19/2023 ![]() “Welcome to another year at Hogwarts…”īy reading the short dialogue tag above, you know that the speaker is Dumbledore, he has a beard, and candles are lighting the room. “Welcome!” said Dumbledore, the candlelight shimmering on his beard. When students arrive at Hogwarts at the beginning of the year, Professor Dumbledore always welcomes them. Rowling’s third Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Instead of including long paragraphs of description, they’ll put important setting details in the dialogue tags to keep the action moving and to give readers a sense of where the characters are. One way successful authors use dialogue tags is to help set a scene. To tackle my semi-writer’s block, I made a list of the jobs dialogue tags can do in a short story or novel and turned to some of my favorite books to see how the authors put these tags to work for them. Sure, I used “said,” included no dialogue tags at times since there were only two people talking, and used some body language tags such as “she crossed her arms ” but I want my novel to sparkle and my dialogue tags to work for my story. Readers already know what the characters and bedroom look like and some of the characters’ quirky traits, so I had trouble creating dialogue tags that made sense and added description and depth to the scene. Two characters are arguing in a bedroom, and the scene is about a third of the way into the novel. Hile I was writing my work-in-progress the other day, I focused on a scene full of dialogue.
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