This is where the skilled use of action beats comes in.

While it’s fine and good to use said as long as you do so sparingly, in a longer conversation you can still end up with the problem of white space-the dialog will lose contact with the setting, and your readers will get the sense that they’re hanging in midair. And for the rest of the space? There are action beats. The best call is to use dialog tags-use said, in fact, and its equally invisible counterpart asked-but use them sparingly, not after every line of dialog. And while paragraphing and conversational interplay will sometimes let us know who’s speaking without any extra direction from the author, writing dialog without any tags at all can get confusing (especially if you have more than two people in conversation). (Tags that actually identify a special action-like screaming, whining, or whispering-are fine where appropriate.)īut you don’t just want to end every line of dialog with “she said” either. In almost every case, the words we would use to replace it are worse: “Shut up!” he implored. Readers don’t really notice it unless it’s used so often that it becomes extreme. Said, while it’s admittedly boring, is invisible. He said, she said, they said, he called, she cried, he replied, and all the rest.īeginning writers, zealous to eliminate weasel words (and occasionally armed with bad advice about “passive language”) sometimes slash this one mercilessly. Said, when used with a pronoun, creates what’s known as a dialog (or speaker) tag: it’s a phrase that tells us who’s speaking. Our focus this month is on words: specifically, adverbs, superfluous verbiage, tics, and “weasel words.” Overuse of such words constitutes our Fatal Flaw #11, a pox on many writers’ prose.īefore I jump into my own topic on this flaw, a few words about said. Editor Rachel Starr Thomson kicks off our look at this flaw with a discussion of dialog tags and narrative beats. Words have weight, and all those extraneous words can sink your story. No matter how long your novel, every word should be chosen with care. Even a story with a great plot and engaging characters can suffer reader ennui due to the overuse of these words. This month our editors are taking a hard look at pesky adverbs and “weasel words”-our Fatal Flaw #11.

Beat tags for free