Sunday Writing Tip: Clean Up Your Dialogue Tags

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Each week, I’ll offer a tip you can take and apply to your WIP to help improve it. They’ll be easy to do and shouldn’t take long, so they’ll be things you can do without taking up your entire Sunday. Though I do reserve the right to offer a good tip now and then that will take longer—but only because it would apply to the entire manuscript.

This week, delete unnecessary dialogue tags.
Dialogue tags are important, but not every spoken line needs a “(s)he said” after it. Too many tags in a row sound clunky at best, melodramatic and silly in the extreme. Go through your tags and decide if you truly need it or not. In most cases, it’s clear who’s speaking, or there’s already stage direction or action attributed to the speaker.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com