Dialogue tags

I’ve been writing lots of dialogue just recently, and the thorny issue of dialogue tags keeps cropping up. I’m sure those of you who write all follow the current advice to eliminate tags as much as possible, and when necessary to use the plain old: “he said” “she asked” varieties. The argument behind using these versions being that they become invisible to the reader and don’t pull them out of the story in the way that more unusual phrases do.

The thing is, sometimes I just want to break the rules. Sometimes I want to write he “rasped” or “murmured” or even bloody well “choked out”, but then I get paranoid that I’m writing badly. The theory is that these sorts of things should be evident in the way the dialogue is written, but that’s not always possible. Sometimes you need to let the reader know that someone is yelling, or whispering. There are convoluted ways of doing this without the tags:

“I want you,” he said, his voice a whisper against my ear.

It works fine, but I can’t help thinking it would be simpler to write:

“I want you,” he whispered in my ear.

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s not a problem to break the rules in these circumstances, so long as you keep it for those moments when it really does seem necessary. What do you all think? Ever get frustrated with dialogue tag rules?

On a related note, what about character voices? It strikes me that these aren’t often described in the detail that physical appearance is, but voices are something I always notice and I love to know how characters speak. Maybe we just don’t have the same range of vocabulary for describing speech sounds, but when you can choose to have voices rumbling, gravelly, throaty, hoarse, piping, mellifluous, sonorous, rich, husky or warm, it seems a shame not to give the reader some idea of what kind of voice to imagine. What do you think? Have a favourite type of voice that I’ve left off the list? Or do you prefer to have it left to your imagination and choose your own favourite voice?