At this point in the game, you probably know what a dialogue tag is. It is a phrase placed at the end of a quote to identify the speaker. It should mimic speech’s natural rhythm and make long dialogue-runs digestible.
When using dialogue tags, it is recommended that you keep them simple. There is nothing wrong with the word ‘said’. Don’t give in to the urge to use every big word you know. If you do, you will end up with a big, clunky, mess. The wrong tag can overshadow the words spoken and draw your reader out of the story.
Example:
“You hit my car!” she screamed. “It wasn’t my fault!” he groaned. “But you ran the red light!” She expostulated. “I know-I’m sorry,” he stammered.
Could you imagine reading an entire book written this way? I would go nuts.
This example shows how tags can effect your story by slowing down the pace and overshadowing the dialogue. I was hesitating after every tag and imagining the characters going through the emotions. I couldn’t help myself. And why would anybody use expostulating? Somebody had their thesaurus open 🙂
When you use the words ‘he said’ or ‘she said’, they are so familiar to your reader that they blur into the background and become invisible. This allows the dialogue itself to come to the forefront. You can also drop tags entirely when it’s clear who’s speaking. Overuse of tags can be just as annoying as using the wrong tag.
Example:
- “You hit my car!” she said.
- “It wasn’t my fault!” he said.
- “But you ran the red light!”
- “I know-I’m sorry.”
I hope you thought this example read much smoother than the first. It didn’t distract from what was being said, and you weren’t focusing on the dialogue tags themselves.
There is so much information on dialogue tags. I’m only scratching the surface with this blog.
I’m not saying that you can’t use emotion in a tag, but it is always better to show the character’s emotions through action than it is throwing an adverb into the dialogue tag ( menacingly, shakily, surprisingly…).
While they are only tags, they play an important role in the mechanics of your story and can lead to some major mistakes if not used appropriately.
-Jan R
Ninety-nine out of one-hundred new writers make the same major mistake. I know I did. They fail to plunge their hero or heroine into trouble at the beginning of the novel. If you don’t pique the interest of your reader from the start, they won’t make it through the first chapter.
If you are to have any chance as a writer, you must embrace the plot. Consider your plot as the skeleton of the novel. It’s the bare bones that keep everything from collapsing.
Have you ever read a sentence and thought it was way too long? The author lost you two commas ago, and now you have to go back and read the whole thing again, to try and figure out what’s going on.
Why do so many perfectly nice people make such pompous asses of themselves when they sit down at a typewriter?-Dean R Koontz.
Don’t you hate it when you’re talking to somebody and they are all wishy washy? Why can’t they just come out and say it? Most of the time you know what they are getting at and want to spit it out for them. Well the same thing goes for writing.
I love reading Jerry Jenkin’s blogs. I always take something away from what he has to say. I don’t know that he offers anything different or new, it’s just the way he says it. I read what he’s written, and a light bulb goes off.
When you’re writing, you need to mix things up. You don’t want to be the one that puts your reader to sleep.
Writing your first novel-Things you should know 