Grimmiglo here, this week in honor of National Marvel Writing Month, I have a quick and dirty

tip about how to format dialogue tags and a meeting middle about how to write action

scenes.

And now on to dialogue tags.

Let's say you're writing a brilliant piece of dialogue for your novel.

The zombie was wearing a pink carnation.

But is it, said, squiggly?

Or squiggly said?

I always have to look that up.

It's a ubiquitous thing.

You probably see dialogue or a quotation in a news story 10 times or even 100 or a thousand

times a day.

But for my brain it's just background noise.

It doesn't register.

Well, the name comes first.

The zombie was wearing a pink carnation, squiggly said.

It's the same for pronouns.

The pronoun comes first, too.

The zombie was wearing a pink carnation, he said.

From now on I'll try to remember that who said it is the important part.

So it comes first.

And you can remember it that way, too.

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