Tag, You’re It!

by Barb, just back from a wonderful week on Prince Edward Island

I’m here with the fourth post in my series about what I’ve learned while writing my 15 published mystery novels, 6 novellas, and dozen or so short stories. (You can see the previous posts here, and here, and here.)

So much writing advice and instruction is aimed at beginners. Learning opportunities get harder to find as you get more advanced. Yes, if you’re lucky, you’re getting feedback from your agent and/or editor, but that’s usually specific to a manuscript. Julie Hennrikus and I have often bemoaned the lack of a support group specifically for the Middies–mid-career, mid-list, middle-aged. (Ha, ha. Well, not necessarily that last one.)

What I’ve tried to do with this series is capture things it took me a while to catch onto. But, of course, writing doesn’t work like that. What is easy or obvious to one person has to be learned by dint of hard work by another. And vice versus. Also, I’ve found I’ve had to learn things in layers. Something that made no sense when I first heard it will click into place when I’ve had more experience.

I’m doing my best to pass on hard-earned wisdom in this series but your mileage may vary.

One of the things you have to do along the way is discard a lot of advice that was good, or at least well-meant, when you were a beginner. I mean by that lessons that were intended to steer you away from the most obvious pitfalls. “Show, don’t tell,” is a good example. Er, yes, but not always.

Another example is about dialogue tags. The first level of advice about dialogue tags that you get is that you should never add an adverb, as in, “Thanks for the fish,” Joe said, gratefully. Yes, that is bad, redundant, and does have the whiff of Dick and Jane about it. But it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who has read a lot of contemporary fiction would even think to do that.

The next layer of prohibition is that you should use no tag but “said.” No whispered, shouted, asked, wondered, queried, explained, complained, etc. The theory here is two-fold. One, you should be able to get anything you need beyond said from the context. The reader should be able to tell from the quote if someone is screaming or musing. Two, said is the least disruptive, most invisible of dialogue tags. It all but disappears in the reader’s mind and therefore doesn’t interrupt the flow of the characters’ conversation.

My reaction to these first two layers of prohibition is often something like, “English is a big, beautiful language and I can use any part of it I want!” (Which is patently untrue since I spent most of my career writing cozy mysteries and there were words I couldn’t use. George Carlin listed most of them in 1972.) I do understand this advice, though my characters do occasionally ask, respond, whisper, or stage-whisper and so on.

The third level of prohibition is that you shouldn’t use dialogue tags at all. Every character, this piece of advice goes, should have such a distinct voice that the reader will know who is saying what.

My reaction to this is three-fold. 1) Great when it works, but as anyone who has ever had to read backwards through three pages of dialogue to figure out which character is speaking will tell you, having to do that definitely takes you out of the story. 2) While I buy that I need to understand who my minor characters are and why they’re saying what they’re saying, short of giving each minor character some kind of accent or speech impediment, endowing each one some instantly recognizable speech pattern seems unduly burdensome to both reader and writer. And 3) if I had known dialogue tags were undesirable, I wouldn’t have had a team of two police detectives and an amateur sleuth because that combination results a in a lot of three-way and four-way conversations.

Seriously, what I have found is that dialogue tags are often unnecessary, but not because of distinct ways of speaking, or thoughts that could only be expressed by one specific character (though that’s good if you can achieve it). Instead I find the best way to eliminate dialogue tags is via bits of business that anchor the conversation in time and space, add to character development, and slow down and open up the conversation, allowing it (and the reader) to breathe.

Example (with tags):

“Where are you going?” Jack asked.

“Dunno.” I answered.

“Really?” Jack said. He was skeptical.

“Let’s go to the spring house,” I responded.

Example (but did you really need them?):

“Where are you going?” Jack drew alongside me, his boots scuffing in the dry dirt of the trail.

“Dunno.” I’d fled the house knowing only that I had to get I had to get away from the oppressive atmosphere that followed the discover of Esme’s body. I’d been walking with no destination in mind.

Jack raised an eyebrow. He didn’t believe me.

“Let’s go to the spring house.” I realized the moment I spoke the words that I’d unwittingly invited him along.

As I’ve said in previous posts in this series these are things I’ve learned along the way, so you’ll see me adding unnecessary tags all the way through to the last book. There is one “said” in Torn Asunder that I justified keeping in “for rhythm” through a dozen revisions. Then, finally, when I read the book in print, I realized (at long last and way too late) the tag was unneeded. (Smacks forehead. Doh!)

Readers and writers: How do you feel about dialogue tags? Do you adhere to the rule of “said” only or none at all? Do you notice dialogue tags? All the time, or only when they’re done badly?