Continuing what’s turning out to be a mini-series of
self-editing tips, I thought talking dialogue tags would be a good topic for today’s
blog. Dialogue tags are tricky beasts, and in submissions and client
manuscripts I find the same errors come up again and again. Can you spot these
errors in the examples?
“I saw a shark!” the woman screamed.
“Don’t talk rubbish,” the Captain
dismissed, “there are no sharks in these waters.”
“I did,” she insisted.
“I think I did also,” the young boy
added.
“You’ve both gone sea-crazy,” the
Captain snapped, looking over the bow of the old boat and into the water.
Like all my posts, I’m not going to claim these are beautifully
written passages, but it should be obvious what the main problem is with them. The
crazy dialogue tags! You trip over them, they are hard to read, and worst of
all, they tell you how to read the dialogue, rather than the dialogue being
strong enough to stand on its own. There is nothing wrong with “he said” – it’s
a practically invisible phrase that readers scan over. English teachers all
over the world can be blamed for teaching us not to use “said” and to use
something more flowery. But we must stop!
Of course, you can use other dialogue tags – asked,
shouted, screamed, added – but in moderation. Too many and your reader will
struggle to hear your dialogue as natural conversation.
Just as the Captain peered into the
water, a great white shark jumped up, snapping his powerful jaws just inches
from the old sea dog.
“Oh my God!” the Captain said
loudly.
“So there are no sharks, then?” the
woman said sarcastically.
“Well, I—I’ve never seen. Just, wow!” the
Captain said in a shocked tone, backing further away from the edge.
“Can we go back to shore now?” the boy
asked hopefully.
As with the earlier example, these adverbs after the
dialogue tags are telling the reader how to read the sentence. Again, dialogue
should be strong enough to convey the tone without it being spelt out. It’s basically
the ‘show not tell’ that we agents are always going on about!
The Captain grabbed his harpoon gun. “No
way am I going back. I’m going to catch that bad boy,” he said, knowing that
this catch could clear all the debts he had on the boat, which hadn’t exactly
been paying for itself with undersubscribed tourist fishing trips.
“Oh, no! Please, sir, please can we go
back,” sobbed the boy, who’d always been afraid of water after nearly drowning at
his very first swimming lesson.
“Yes, please. I’ll pay you extra,” the
terrified woman said, hoping that her bank account wasn’t overdrawn again after
her gambling ex-husband got hold of her new bank card.
I’m sure it’s obvious, but this is very expositional.
It’s telling the reader something about a character in a really awkward and
unnatural way. This should be a high-tension scene, so would the woman really
be thinking about her ex-husband?
“Pay me extra, eh?” The Captain
stepped towards the woman, wondering if that was a better offer than risking
his neck trying to catch a big shark. “Now that I might be interested in.”
“I can get some cash when we get
ashore.” The woman fumbled with her wallet, seeing nothing but a one-dollar bill.
“Okay, then.” He put down the gun. “I
suppose I’m too old to be hunting sharks.”
The boy jumped from his seat and
hugged the old man. “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Don’t fuss, now!” The Captain
shrugged the boy off and turned the ship back to shore.
It’s fine to not use dialogue tags at all, and to
show who is talking by interspersing the dialogue with beats or movement. But add
too many beats and the dialogue doesn’t flow, leading to all the pace being sucked
out of a dramatic scene (not that this is a very dramatic piece of writing, considering
a shark just appeared!).
As with all ‘rules,’ these are just guidelines for
polishing your work. If you know the rules, then you’ll know when it’s okay to
break them. Maybe you want to use a beat, or perhaps giving a little bit of
exposition is right for your plot at that stage of your story. Use in
moderation and the reader will barely notice. What you don’t want to do is pull
the reader out of the story,” said the slightly excitable literary agent who
was wondering what editing tips she would blog about next time.
