How to Write Dialogue: Tags, Subtext and Format (With Counts)

To write dialogue that sounds human, let each character answer what they want to say rather than what was asked, keep tags short and mostly invisible ("said" and "asked" carry about half of all tags in classic fiction), start a new paragraph whenever the speaker changes, and cut any line where a character states exactly what they feel. Below: what ten public-domain novels actually do with tags (we counted), the format rules in one table, how subtext works, and a before/after you can copy.

How many dialogue tags do real novels use?

Craft advice on tags is usually an opinion. Elmore Leonard's third rule is "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue," because "the verb is the writer sticking his nose in" (his rules, as reprinted by Farnam Street, 2013; the original ran in The New York Times in July 2001). We counted what published authors did.

Method (10 Nov 2026): the full text of ten novels from Project Gutenberg, a script counting every one of about fifty speech verbs (said, asked, cried, replied, whispered, murmured…) placed right next to a closing or opening quotation mark. It misses odd constructions, so read the counts as a floor; the ratios between books are what matter.

Across all ten, 6,441 tags: "said" alone is 2,862 of them (44%), then "cried" (605), "asked" (532), "answered" (340) and "replied" (330). Three things follow.

• The classics were not "said only". Even Gatsby, a model of restraint, leans on cried, inquired and demanded. Leonard's rule is a taste, not a law.
• The range is wide. Wuthering Heights, at 9.3 tags per thousand words, is the least "said"-heavy (30%) and uses 44 different verbs. The two books with the fewest tags (Tom Sawyer, Dracula) lean hardest on plain "said" (74% and 78% with "asked").
• The modern reader's ear is not the Victorian one. "Cried" is the second most common tag across the ten, and in a current manuscript it reads as shouting. If you use it, mean shouting.

A workable rule you can check on your own chapter: search for "said" and "asked", then count the other tag verbs. If more than half of your tags are something else, read those lines aloud; each one should add something the line itself doesn't already say.

Dialogue format: the rules in one table

The punctuation questions are the same ones every time ("how to format dialogue" is 1,300 searches a month in the US, Keyword Planner, Nov 2026). These follow Reedsy's punctuation rules (page updated 15 Oct 2025), American conventions.

Two format habits matter more than the punctuation. First, a new paragraph for each speaker lets you drop tags in a two-person exchange, because the reader tracks who's talking by position. Second, put an action beat in the same paragraph as the speech it belongs to; it tells the reader who is speaking and costs nothing.

Subtext: what a character does instead of answering

Real people mostly don't say what they mean. The usual fix is to give every line a second job: it answers a different question than the one asked, or refuses to.

Worked example (written for this page). Two siblings, clearing their mother's flat.

Before, the characters say what they feel:

"I'm angry you never visited her," Ines said. "I feel like I did everything and you just left me alone with it." "I'm sorry," Paul said. "I felt guilty, so I stayed away. I know that was wrong."

After, they argue about the clock:

Ines lifted the clock off the nail and wrapped it in a towel. "You'll want the lamp." "I don't want anything." "Good. Because the clock's coming with me." She set it in the box. "She wound it every Sunday. Did you know that?" Paul looked at the window. "Is there a bag for the shoes?"

What changed: nobody names an emotion; the grievance (Sundays, visits) rides on an object; Paul answers a different question, which tells the reader he can't face the first one. The length is about the same, and the second version has no tags at all.

A quick test for any exchange: cover the tags and ask what each speaker wants in this scene. If both could be summed up as "to tell the other how they feel", rewrite one of them so they want something else (the clock, the shoes, to leave).

Dialogue that sounds like AI wrote it

Models over-explain. Their characters finish each other's thoughts politely, resolve the quarrel in the last exchange and use the same register as each other. If you draft with AI, giving each character a distinct voice (written as sample lines, not adjectives) fixes most of it, and the rest of the machine-sounding tells are a separate editing pass. The test is the same as above: read the dialogue with the names removed.

How to write dialogue in a story, step by step

1. Decide what each speaker wants from the scene, in one phrase each.
2. Write the exchange with no tags and no stage directions.
3. Cut every line that states a feeling outright; replace it with what the character does or avoids.
4. Add tags only where the reader would lose track of who speaks, mostly "said".
5. Add one action beat per speaker per page, in the same paragraph as their line.
6. Read it aloud. Anything you wouldn't say in that room, cut.

Writing it in KudoWrite

In KudoWrite a chapter is written beat by beat, and a beat can be as small as the sketch "Ines wraps the clock and asks Paul about the shoes". Put how each of them talks in their story-bible entry (a line of how they speak, two lines they'd say), and the bible entries a passage needs are handed to the model when that beat is written, so a clipped brother stays clipped in chapter 30. If a line comes out too tidy, steer the beat with one sentence ("Paul doesn't answer the question about the clock") and it is edited in place. The story bible guide shows how to set an entry up, and you can start a scene in KudoWrite with just the one-line sketch above.

Checked November 2026: search demand is Keyword Planner, US, monthly: "how to write dialogue" 4,400; "how to write dialogue in a story" 2,400; "how to format dialogue" 1,300.