Writing Reader here wondering about something, how do you writers make it clear who's talking without telling it explicitly who is the one talking?

[Vlue]

Well, let's I have been reading a lot of LN in the past where I was confused about which one is talking especially in the group unless they have a very obvious distinct way of talking or something like "Character a said", so my question would how you guys would write dialogue and make it clear which character is talking especially if in a group?

 

[Otjag]

Well, I try to shift the attention to who is speaking by adding little discribtions of what the persons face or body is doing before the speech instead of directly saying who is speaking. Example: She looked confused at me. "What do you mean?" I sighed and simply shook my head. "Forget about it. It's not important anyway."

 

[Zirrboy]

1. Do give them distinct ways of talking. Doesn't have to be outlandishly quirky, but character voices being weak/similar is rarely good.
2. Let them (re)act while they speak. This also massively widens your options for character expressiveness. Though one every line can be a bit much.
3. Limit active conversation participants to around 3 at a given time. Too many will get confusing even if you had the voices to distinguish.
4. "Character said" isn't necessarily bad, it just seems stiff if overused, but that goes for most techniques. And the verbs indicate tone.

 

[Jemini]

"I tell the the reader who is talking with speaker tags" I say. "It is the usual method most western authors use. Although, I have heard that Japanese writers like to use ending words instead, which is why so many have such strange ending words that even make it into the English translation.

 

[Akaichi]

Character tags if three or more... you can also give the characters a unique way of talking or acting.
It all depends on the scene.

 

[LilRora]

That:

Well, I try to shift the attention to who is speaking by adding little discribtions of what the persons face or body is doing before the speech instead of directly saying who is speaking. Example: She looked confused at me. "What do you mean?" I sighed and simply shook my head. "Forget about it. It's not important anyway."

You don't have to explicitly say who is speaking - it's enough to imply who it is, and it's really hard to fuck it up badly enough to make readers unable to guess almost immediately.

This way you can add some important actions that would sound awkward otherwise. For example:

"Please wait a moment." She started flipping through the pages till she arrived at *insert something here* and pointed her finger at it. "Here it is."

You could write that she said and started flipping through pages, but it's not necessary and it would make the sentence awkwardly long.

 

[Tsuru]

Random info (joke and serious) :
To-aru-majutsu author. He made the misakas with different speeches to easy differentiate.

(From memory)
""The enemy is down" says Misaka as she reload her weapon" = clone misaka
""Accelerator ! I want to eat chicken !" says Misaka as Misaka keep drooling while thinking of the fried chicken" = last order (loli misaka clone)

Then there is the gangster-like older clone misaka but i forgot how was her style of speaking.
As you can see the clone talk and detail her actions, meanwhile last order do that BUT repeat MISAKA compared to "she". Basically like some long ago characters before that talk in 3rd person.
Biggest advice. And probably one the biggest advice to any author.
= Read more and learn.

 

[Vlue]

"I tell the the reader who is talking with speaker tags" I say. "It is the usual method most western authors use. Although, I have heard that Japanese writers like to use ending words instead, which is why so many have such strange ending words that even make it into the English translation.

What does ending words in this context mean here and how would they be used?

 

[CupcakeNinja]

Well, let's I have been reading a lot of LN in the past where I was confused about which one is talking especially in the group unless they have a very obvious distinct way of talking or something like "Character a said", so my question would how you guys would write dialogue and make it clear which character is talking especially if in a group?

Context clues. If two characters are mentioned in succession, then the next dialogue is usually from the character who was previously mentioned first.

Like,: Vera and Mary both turned their heads at the absurd statement.

"Are you stupid?"

"Asking us to do that...Young Master, aren't you being too unreasonable towards this mother and daughter?"

not only, but different cjaracters have different personalities and ways of speech. Also, they may address certain character, like the MC, differently.

Vera regularly talks casually, and even harshly, to the MC. Mary is more polite and calm, so readers who will know who is talking simply from that alone.

As i said. Contextual. Readers are smarter than you'd think, you dont need to spoon feed them all the time. Maybe some wont understand, but they just need to get on our level

 

[Nhatduongg]

Well, let's I have been reading a lot of LN in the past where I was confused about which one is talking especially in the group unless they have a very obvious distinct way of talking or something like "Character a said", so my question would how you guys would write dialogue and make it clear which character is talking especially if in a group?

That's the problem with the English language. For my language, which is Vietnamese, and Japanese too, the pronoun system is so complex that you can tell who is talking just by looking at the pronouns alone and character tags are totally unnecessary and that's why for some translated LNs, the translator actually added in the character tags, which didn't exist at all in the original texts. If you want a demonstration, I'll be glad to give.

Anyways, back to your question. Careful phrasing and speech order is how I and other author goes, as far as I'm aware. In two characters' dialogue, it would be easy since they would basically be talking in order. In three or more characters' dialogue, well, unfortunately "A/B/C said" just have to do some of the times.

 

[ChrisLensman]

Phrases like "[character] said" or "he said/she said", or speech tags, are considered 'silent phrases'. Readers will generally overlook them while reading so there is no issue with using them constantly. They won't get annoying. You'll likely ignore them while reading and they're just there so you don't get confused.
Oh, and this really only applies to "[character] said", "[character] asked" and "[character] replied", by the way. More exotic verbs don't fly under the radar the way "say", "ask" and "reply" do.
Unfortunately all of this doesn't apply for audiobooks, where the narrator(s) will use different voices for the different characters, which makes tagging the dialogue redundant.
But unless you're some sort of big-shot who gets offers for Audible Originals you should never compromise the readability of your book for a potential audiobook release.

tl;dr: "he said/she said" is perfectly fine. Just ignore it, that's what it's meant for.

 

[Shard]

Personally, I prefer directly stating who is speaking the majority of the time. That said, you want to vary your word choices, rather than just using 'said' every time. Said, stated, exclaimed, replied, responded, answered, queried, questioned, asked, mumbled, ranted, spoke, continued, shouted, remarked, proclaimed, mentioned, whispered, relayed, quoted, confirmed, denied, argued, there are tons of different words you can use to describe the act of speaking without being too repetitive.

If you want examples, feel free to check out my story in my signature.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

Phrases like "[character] said" or "he said/she said", or speech tags, are considered 'silent phrases'. Readers will generally overlook them while reading so there is no issue with using them constantly. They won't get annoying.

They will get annoying.

 

[ThanksALot]

You use the basic dialogue tags. Don't go search for synonyms of said.
When there's a bunch of characters, you use quite a lot of them.
Most authors use it once, then keep the flow.

E.g.

"Hello!" said Char1
"Hi!" said Char2
"First one who beats the other guy gets 5000 dollars," said Char3

Char2 then punched Char1 in the face. Char 3 clapped her hands.

"The heck bro?"
"What you gonna do, bro?"
"Fight! Fight!"

Char1 and Char2 fight until midnight. They knocked each other out. Char3 stole all their money.

Plus...

Then there's hard stuff like making the way a character speaks unique. Don't go and use accents and stuff that's annoying.
I'm talking about how they describe things and what they call other characters.
While describing the scene or actions, you can tell who will speak.
It's hard since even actual conversation is hard to determine sometimes.

Light Novels tend to not use dialogue tags. Some translations aren't as good, so that is why you get confused.
The languages are also different and don't translate directly. A few also just suck at dialogues.


By the way, I can't do this stuff yet lol.

 

[Cipiteca396]

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It might seem a little awkward at first, but it's really good advice.

As a summary, the problem you might be having is lack of context. If you aren't sure who's talking, maybe the characters are "speaking" instead of existing. In a dialogue, you can show who's talking by describing their actions and body language instead of just labeling the dialogue.

Alternatively, the problem might be paragraph structure. If you need to label dialogue, is it because multiple people are talking all at once, with no way to distinguish them? Then all you have to do is separate the paragraphs based on who acts or speaks in them.

Anise could only groan at the two's antics. "Don't you have things to do? Like- homework or something?"

Billy waved her off with a laugh. "They aren't giving homework this close to the break. Come on and join in, it's more fun than being all sour all the time."

Cali nodded approvingly. "Yeah, come on Annie. You'll go blind if you keep staring at those books every day." She proffered the third bag. "Everything's already done. You just need to play along."

"Fine." Anise carefully lifted herself off the bench. For a moment she glared at the bag, before finally collecting it. "But only for a little while."

The light weight settled on her shoulder, and she ignored the soft cheers of the other two as they raced off. Why am I even humoring them like this...

Oh, writing in first person can also help, since you can use I and my and me. But that's sort of cheating.

 

[RepresentingCaution]

I keep this in a document and copy and paste this about once a week on writing.com:

Spoiler

Formatting tip: please start a new paragraph every time the speaker changes in dialogue. This is standard practice in fiction and helps make the piece easier to read.

 

[AliceShiki]

Well, let's I have been reading a lot of LN in the past where I was confused about which one is talking especially in the group unless they have a very obvious distinct way of talking or something like "Character a said", so my question would how you guys would write dialogue and make it clear which character is talking especially if in a group?

The thing is, you're comparing Light Novels and English Novels, and both of those work on completely different standards.

In Japanese Light Novels, characters usually have speech quirks that make it easy to know who is the speaker. This is, more often than not, completely lost in the translation.

In English Novels, you by default add stuff that makes it clear who is speaking. It's not even a question, you should always do it.

It doesn't necessarily needs to be a "He said." "I said" though. You just need to make it clear through some other clues who are the speakers.

Keeping one speaker per paragraph is the basic, the other part can be involving actions in the middle of your dialogue.

Like, if you make [Character A] punch [Character B], and [Character A] says something in the same paragraph that the punching happened, it's probably safe to leave out any dialogue tags. The reader will understand that it was [Character A] speaking.

As for the Light Novels... Good translators will actually add dialogue tags to the dialogue in Japanese novels. The speech quirks will most likely be lost in the translation, so you can't rely on them. You should add dialogue tags instead in order to make it easy to know who is speaking at any given time. The reason you were confused about who was the person talking was because the translator didn't do a good job and didn't make the speaker clear.

 

[ConansWitchBaby]

Giving them enough personality that you can identify them individually.

 

[Premier]

Dialogue tags are essential if it's not clear who is speaking. If two people are talking, it's usually enough to identify who went first and then not worry about it unless it's a long conversation.

Brandy and Maple stopped by the creek.

"The fish here are massive," Brandy said.

"How would you know you ever caught one?"

"I got bit by one! Took a chunk right out of my leg. Want to see the scar?"


Multi-person scenes it's a bit more necessary, but there are other ways to avoid just using said. If your character does an action along with it, you don't need to tag them as speaking, making the writing more colorful.

"Got one!" Brandy pulled on her fishing rod as the reel clicked rapidly.

"It's getting away!" Maple jumped to her feet, water splashing up over the lip of the boat as she pointed across the lake at the retreating fish.

"Relax, it's meant to do that. It'll tire out," Calcine said, "You jump about like that, you'll spill us all out."

 

[BrianMcGoldrick]

Well, let's I have been reading a lot of LN in the past where I was confused about which one is talking especially in the group unless they have a very obvious distinct way of talking or something like "Character a said", so my question would how you guys would write dialogue and make it clear which character is talking especially if in a group?

Here is an example. No 'he said' 'she said', but It's pretty obvious who is speaking.
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Hoshi's expression resembles that of a child that just lost its favorite toy. "But, Beast, it's Mika-chan's cooking!"

I shrug "I get to east her cooking every day. Missing it for one breakfast is fine."

Mika-chan glares at me. "Raymon-san! You're being mean to Hoshi-sama and you need to eat you breakfast. I made cutlets out of that Forest Cat you killed the other day."

With his hands folded, Hoshi get so close his face is practically pressed into my chest. "Beast. Please! It's Mika-chan's cooking!"