I’ve written about dialogue several times before, and yet I keep feeling the need to stress, once again, that poor dialogue skills can ruin a manuscript. My standard guideline is that all we really need is “said” for a statement and “asked” for a question. Of course we want variation and a bit of imagination, but if you get carried away with highbrow dialogue tags, your writing will immediately be identified as amateurish. The fancy words distract from the flow of the verbal exchange, causing the reader to focus more on the tag than on the dialogue.
Like punctuation, a dialogue tag is important, but we don’t want it to dominate the writing. It should be there, doing its job, but not claiming the limelight.
I mentioned in one of my recent posts that I had suffered through a horrible book of botched up dialogue and punctuation rules that almost made me put the book down. It had a good plot, but I will never put myself through that kind of torture again, reading a book so overflowing with one mistake after another. It’s not fair to the reader to publish something like that, and it’s detrimental to the author’s future writing career.
In this post, I want to show some examples of excessive tag use.
Here are some examples of what I saw, but I will put in the corrected punctuation and deal with that in the next post.
“Why did you hurt her?” she inquired.
“I don’t really know,” he grimaced.
“I don’t know how I climbed that tree,” he laughed.
“Will you call me tonight?” she smiled.
“You’d better,” she demanded.
In most cases, avoid using these words. If you must use them, do it sparingly.
Here are some of the words best avoided as dialogue tags:
inquired, responded, answered, queried, suggested, shouted, yelled, whispered, retorted, questioned.
Occasionally you might want to use a word like whispered, or muttered, to show the way the words were said, but for the most part, stick to the words that won’t make the reader stop to ponder the dialogue tag rather than the dialogue itself.
*Some words don’t even make any sense to use as dialogue tags, so avoid using these:
smiled, laughed, sighed, grimaced, frowned, scowled.
One last thing I’d like to point out is that we don’t always need a dialogue tag. If you can avoid them, please do. If only two people are having a conversation, you might only need to an occasional tag to mark who is talking. You can also do this by leading (or sometimes following) with an action, followed by the spoken words, thus avoiding using “said” and “asked” altogether.
Joan shuffled her feet and studied the ground. “I’m so sorry about that, Sam.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Sam gave her a hug.
“But I do worry about it.”
“Don’t. We’re okay.”
Next time, a short bit on punctuating dialogue.