How This Dialogue Works: Speech Tags in Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Dialogue-heavy scenes are full of challenges, from creating subtly distinct voices to making exchanges sound natural even as they convey important information. While the problems are as thick as the possibilities, one common issue is finding fresh ways to attribute speech, with a lot of authors struggling not to overuse “said,” even as it’s largely invisible. Still, despite its inconspicuous profile, there’ll come a time—maybe several times—when you need other options, and Skippy Dies by Paul Murray offers a masterclass on how to variate speech tags without sounding awkward.

Published in 2010, this is a sometimes hilarious, sometimes disturbing, and often heartbreaking novel about a group of kids at a Catholic boarding school in Dublin. Skippy is Daniel’s nickname, and Daniel dies during a donut-eating contest in the opening pages. The rest of the book follows the events leading up to his death as well as how people cope in the aftermath.

At close to 700 pages, it’s a tome, but thanks to its stunning balance of darkness and light, Skippy Dies holds on tight and moves surprisingly fast. Murray’s a staggering talent, and you could track any number of techniques throughout this and other works, but one thing he really excels at is dialogue—and he’s not afraid to use somewhat purple speech tags to carry his multi-character exchanges, always managing to make his choices seem perfectly appropriate despite their excess.

When you first start writing, it’s common to feel like “said,” “asked,” “whispered,” “screamed,” and other basic speech tags either overstay their welcome or just slack off on the job, and you might find yourself reaching for more inventive verbs, like “snarled,” “breathed,” “objected,” or the often and rightly ridiculed “ejaculated.” You might even find yourself throwing adverbs into the mix, like “raggedly,” “huskily,” “throatily,” or “sonorously,” maybe even in respective conjunction with aforementioned verbs. This groping around is typically viewed as a beginner’s mistake, but actually, it’s an experience that visits writers throughout their careers.

While the edict is to stick to basic tags, like most writing rules, there’s room to do your own thing, as long as you’re crafty. Let’s have a look at a snippet from a long exchange in the first third of Skippy Dies. This is between Skippy and several of his friends during a Halloween dance, and it’s about whether he should approach a hot girl who’s dating a psychotic bully. It’s a four- or five-page exchange, too long to reproduce here, but we only need a snapshot to get the idea.

“Sorry, dude,” Niall commiserates. Skippy is gazing at the floor as if counting the fragments of his shattered life.

“I think you should go talk to her anyway,” counsels Ruprecht.

“You fat moron, didn’t you hear what he said?” Dennis rebuts. “He said he’d seen her with Carl. Carl is the key word here. It means get the hell out of the way, or start digging your own grave.”

“He only said he’d seen her with Carl,” Ruprecht corrects him. “There could be any number of explanations for that.”

“Oh sure, maybe they’re in Stamp Club together.”

“Let’s just stop talking about it,” Skippy says desolately.

“But Carl,” Ruprecht says. “Why would anyone want to go out with Carl?”

“Because that’s what girls do, you idiot,” Dennis returns. “The more of an asshole a guy is, the more girls he’s got lining up to give him blowjobs. That is a scientific fact.”

“You can’t just say something is a scientific fact," Ruprecht rejoins.

As you can see, Murray’s breaking all the rules, hardly ever using plain speech tags, unapologetically cramming in an adverb, and letting some dialogue go unattributed—no speech tag, no anchoring character description. In parts of the exchange not quoted, he even uses verb phrases that can’t produce words, like this: “‘Over there,’ Geoff points with a decomposing finger.” Tag purists are probably cringing, and on a meta level, I suspect that’s a good part of the point: Murray’s mocking them, slapping his desk and wiping his eyes.

But motivations aside, why does it work? First, the quality of the dialogue is next level. In the excerpt, the immediately surrounding pages, and throughout the novel, Murray depicts boys as they are: casually insulting, sexually objectifying, and surprisingly sympathizing.

The bittersweet puerility rings so true, we don’t even need a tag or descriptive attribution to tell us who some speakers are. In the quoted exchange, the unattributed dialogue might belong to Dennis, pressing his case, but there are several mouthy boys in the group, all chirping away over the run of these pages, and because this isn’t the only unattributed riff, it could belong to anyone. Which is the point. It doesn’t matter who said it specifically. The boys transcend their individuality, becoming a raunchy, blistering bulge of boyhood itself.

Next, apart from the content, the rhythms of the individual speakers as well as the broader conversational flow feel completely natural—there’s not a single stilt to trip over. If you can write dialogue like this, readers will give you grace. You’ll earn your credibility syllable by syllable, and what might seem like a lapse in certain hands will seem, at the very least, like an acceptable indulgence in yours.

Another reason the tags, adverbs, and lack of tags work so well is the tone. These boys are ridiculous. They’re frothing with immaturity, saying far more offensive and hilarious things than I’ve reproduced here, and saying them at length—it really is a long exchange. The speech tags mirror this excess, and as the conversation escalates in pitch and brinkmanship, so does the prose that frames it. None of this would’ve worked so well if the boys were, say, grieving or earnestly fearful. In fact, elsewhere in Skippy Dies, Murray restrains himself when the pathos calls for it.

But even when the boys are at the dance, he knows when to rein things in, occasionally bringing his tags back to standard, for example when he gradually moves from the redundant “corrects him” to a riff of unattributed dialogue, then from the adverb-marred “says desolately” to the plain and simple “says” before ramping up again with “returns.” If you study the whole scene, you’ll see he does this a couple times, letting his purple kite fly before winding it in, then unspooling it again for another big laugh.

So yes, in many cases, words like “said,” “asked,” and even “screamed” are all you need and all you should use, but like so much writing advice (“show, don’t tell” coming immediately to mind), there’s plenty of room to play around. If you want to try more kinetic speech tags, get a copy of Skippy Dies so you can study the dialogue, characterization, tone, and use of standards as a baseline. Not everyone can get away with this, and that’s probably a good thing, but giving it a try now and then will help you appreciate why some people do.