Placement of "He/She Said"

Most of us have characters who speak. Each character should have his/her own pattern of speech, vocabulary and accent. Much of the time, your reader should be able to tell who’s speaking by how it’s said, but the rest of the time, you’ll need to identify the speaker.

So how do you do this? You use “said.” But how do you do that?

I have four main methods:

1. “Then,” Smith said, “we saw it.”

I like this one because it lets you include a dramatic pause without having to worry about using a dash, ellipsis or other punctuation mark. Strategic placement of “he/she said” can change the whole effect of the sentence. “If you get out of here,” Smith said, “come back for me.” The pause makes me think Smith isn’t very hopeful.

Use this sparingly, though, so you won’t annoy your readers with needless interruptions … and make sure it actually fits. This is just stupid: “Then we,” Smith said, “saw it.”

2. “Then we saw it,” Smith said.

The second method is more common and I use it most of the time. You don’t want to use this for every sentence in a conversation or it will be overwhelming. However, you do want to sprinkle a few of these in there so your reader isn’t forced to count lines to determine who said what.

3. Smith said, “Then we saw it.”

I rarely use this one, but I do find it useful when I write an entire paragraph about one character and then I have a completely different character say something.

For example, in the fourth novel, I have a paragraph that shows Hawkins jogging in the dock area when he gets an unexpected call over the radio.

I followed it up with this:

Bartucci said, "Reg, you need to come up here and tell somebody I'm not your personal secretary."

Otherwise, the reader would have to get to the very end of the sentence to know who's saying this and it might be confusing.

(I hope you're excited to read a snippet of the next novel before anyone else!)

4. None of the above.

Of course, sometimes you can avoid "said" altogether if you use an action to identify the speaker.

Hawkins laughed. "I don't think anybody's got him completely figured out. I think he likes it that way."

That's from Outsider. (You get extra credit if you know who Reg is talking about.)

One more thing: beware of using too many synonyms for “said” or it can get ridiculous. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got when I started my first novel was to take out every “mumbled, stated, declared, proclaimed, grumbled, or asserted” and replace them with “said.” It made the story much smoother and better. I throw in the occasional “shouted” or “demanded,” but I use them sparingly.

I hope this is helpful. You want to identify who’s speaking so the reader can follow along, but you don’t want the reader to stumble over it.

Play around with these and see which works best the next time one of your characters has something to say.