Broadly you can slice your story into three bits: dialogue, description, and action. Or something? Maybe exposition is separate? You can find people who will argue about that and re-slice it for you. I'm not going to fight with you, everything you've written is amazing.

We've mentioned direct speech often, we've skirted around some of the issues, now its time to pull the conch shell from the death god's hands, and pour the river of blood over our heads while screaming the unholy rite of the end, like we do every weekend. Right? Right? Right? Oh shit. Don't tell anyone.

Moving on. Dialogue has very, very different rules to the rest of what we write. It's different because it's subjective and yet you don't need to worry about showing rather than telling. When your characters say something, they do so from their own point of view, not the narrator's. The distance you can put between your character's voices and your narrator's voice is important to establish their independence and their individual personalities. But that's not interesting, because we aren't talking about the whole world of writing, we're interested in the craft of line editing. I'm sure you figured out your characters ages ago.

As you've probably noticed, for the things that are said, you can ignore pretty much this entire book so far. Adverbs: use 'em! Fragments: all the time! Adjectives: whatever you feel like! You're reporting your character's stumbling confessions, and they say all that stuff. Echoing is harder, and you need to make sure you only do it consciously, because your reader will notice it, even through inverted commas, despite the fact that humans echo all the time. So even when your baked goods are screaming at each other, don't repeat the word 'hands' OK?

But the thing that we're going to spend the majority of time on this chapter, isn't what your beloved characters are saying: it's how you know who's saying what. Yes, it's speech tags. It's the little dollops of text between spoken dialogue.

This is a great big grab bag of rules, some enforced harder than others, so we're going to just blunder through it all and see what we get.

Rule one. Use action beats often. An action beat is a bit of text in speech which signals who's speaking, without explicitly saying 'said' or equivalent.

'You don't understand.' Cressida pulled the motherboard from her backpack. 'I had it. I had it all along. It doesn't matter what Kronos does.'

Malcolm shook his head. 'That doesn't make any sense. It was in the Omnivore's power assembly.'

Cressida smiled, and the sun caught her space teeth. They glittered like the end of the world.

'Yes, it was. And then I taught the Omnivore about gymkhana. It loves the tiny ponies. We're going to be OK, Malcolm. We're going to be OK.'

Action beats are good because they move the story on and remove repetition and also give us flavour. Absolute win-win.

Rule two. Don't be afraid of 'said'. Yes it's a verb, but it's a special one because it's pretty much invisible, like 'was'. If it's overused you'll get echoing, but you need to use it a lot to get to that state, so sprinkle it around fairly liberally. It's tempting to use more complicated speech tag verbs, but honestly, they can get a bit gloopy.

'You have nothing,' Kronos said. 'It's over. In ten days I'll be in every calculator in Belgium. They'll all just print out 8008135 and that thing where it says "Shell Oil" when you turn it upside down. And the can-can. You can do nothing, puny human.'

Cressida picked up the motherboard, and the light shone in her space hair. It sparkled like a supernova.

'You might think that,' she said. 'But look what I have here...'

I used two 'said's in about the same number of words that I echoed 'hands' in the previous chapter, and I bet you didn't notice, right?

Rule three. Use 'asked' when someone asks a question. Never pair a question with a 'said' or a statement with an 'asked'. You can use 'replied' when someone, you know, replies. But, unlike 'said', these will trigger echoing more easily, so treat them carefully.

'Are you OK?' Malcolm asked. His face was streaked with bitcoin dust, and there were fragments of blockchain in his hair.

'I've been better,' Cressida replied. Her space eyes gleamed in the darkness. 'But I'm intact. How are you?'

Malcolm stood up. As he rose, the half-built consensus fell to pieces around him, collapsing into shards that skittered across the metal floor.

'I'm basically OK. Listen, Cressida. I... Maybe...? Oh dammit. Will you marry me?'

Four. As we said already, avoid adverbs on speech tags unless – maybe – they indicate speech directions that we have no way of showing in the speech. But always strive to use dialogue which shows your intent, rather than adverbs.

'You think you love me,' Cressida said, quietly. 'But you don't. You love the idea of me, not what I actually am.'

The tears in her eyes sparkled like distant stars.

'I'm not human enough for you,' she continued. 'I'm made of the same stuff as the void. This, all this, it's your world. You're lovely, Malcolm, you really are. But I need to return to my original form, and if you were with me, that would destroy you.' She pushed back a lock of hair, and smiled, despite it all. 'I'll miss the shuffleboard, too.'

That has one adverb and I actually think I'd nix it, and yet it's got the pathos of a lovestruck baby elephant loose in a glass-blowers. You can convey so much emotion with little actions and careful speech, so really dial the 'ly' words back.

Five. When using nouns, prefer 'Cressida said' over 'said Cressida'. This rules works for all fiction, including works that doesn't include Cressida. No example of this. Instead, when you get mad at me, I'm just going to say, yes, look at your books. It's a modern thing, so check in more recently published works. It's one of those things that you don't notice until you read some published fiction. (I didn't! All my earlier examples are wrong! I'll have to go back and fix them at some point.)

Six. Use speech verbs which actually describe making words with your mouth.

'I will destroy you,' Kronos gloated.

'No you won't,' Malcom laughed back.

You can say something gloatingly, and you can laugh after you say something, but you can't gloat something or laugh something. They are both verbs but they don't actually describe the act of making noises with your fleshy meat sack mouth. This feels like a kicker, until you realise that you're really being helped with showing rather than telling. 'Gloating' is absolutely in the domain of adverbs and I don't need it, I should strengthen my speech. If I make my laughter an action beat, it will make it better.

'I will crush you. I will destroy you and I won't even notice your absence. You will be nothing but vile organic stains on my metal floors,' said Kronos.

'No you won't.' Malcolm stared into the camera and laughed.

Having said that, this one is probably the weakest of all the rules. You sometimes see published authors doing this (my bugbear is 'snorted'. I have absolutely seen that used as a speech tag in a novel, and I hate it. Reader challenge: right now, snort some speech. Yeah, exactly) so if you wanna do it, do it, but be aware that it's weakening your text just ever so slightly.

Seven: vary the position and type of tags.

'Oh Malcolm, I'm so glad to see you,' said Lotty.

Malcolm slumped into the front seat of the doom bus. 'She's gone, Lotty. Gone forever.' The falling rain streaked the windscreen.

'I know she meant a lot to you.' Lotty didn't start the engine. Instead, she just stared at her key fob, a tiny model of a spleen. 'I know, also, that you liked her a lot. But Malcolm – this day always had to come.'

I put tags at the beginning, the middle and the end. Only one is a tag, the others are action beats.

Eight: you can drop the tags completely if it's unambiguous as to who's talking, particularly if there are two people and one of them uses the other one's name.

'Lotty, thanks so much for what you said earlier,' said Malcolm. 'It really helped.'

'You're welcome, Malcolm. I know I don't have space hands, but I... I can do cool stuff too.'

'You do the coolest stuff, Lotty. You do the coolest stuff.'

She smiled, turned, and walked away. Then, with a kick as swift as a comet, she scored the winning penalty in the cup final.

The crowd erupted around them.

#

Summary: speech tags are complicated!

Use action beats often. Don't be afraid of 'said'. Never pair a question with a 'said' or a statement with an 'asked'. Avoid adverbs. Prefer 'Cressida said' over 'said Cressida'. Use speech verbs which involve actual speech, but some people break this, so. Vary the position of the tags. You can drop the tags completely if it's unambiguous as to who's talking, and having speech use names is good for that.