Tag: dialogue tags

Thursday Technicalities: Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts

Ariel Paiement1 Comment
Publishing Journey

Last week, we went over dialogue tags and action beats. This week we’re going to talk formatting and the do’s and don’ts when it comes to dialogue! So let’s get started.

Dialogue Do’s

  • Do make sure your dialogue is paragraphed properly. Each time the speaker changes, the dialogue of the new speaker starts a new paragraph. Ie:

“I don’t know why you’re being so stubborn, Damien.” Lucy crossed her arms.

“Because I can be? Seeing you upset is too much fun to pass up.”

  • Do use proper punctuation for dialogue tags vs action beats. Ie:

Dialogue tags:

“What do you mean she isn’t here? She promised,” Evan muttered.

or

“I thought you were going on vacation. You,” Jane said, “have a serious issue with sticking to your plans.”

Action beats:

“I don’t understand. You’re leaving?” Maria toyed with the hem of her t-shirt. “Why?”

or

“What’s the problem? You didn’t object before.” Carson leaned against the car door.

The key is that dialogue tags use commas to end the last sentence of dialogue before the tag while action beats use periods.

  • Do make sure to use action beats and dialogue tags only as needed. They’re not for propping up weak dialogue. For further discussion of this, read my post on Dialogue Tags vs Action Beats.
  • Do make it sound as natural as possible. You want it to mimic how people speak in real life without including redundant or pointless information. The occasional uh or um is fine, but the key is not to overdo it. We’re simulating real life, not copying it word-for-word.
  • Do read it out loud! This is the quickest way to catch stiff or otherwise bad dialogue. Your mind might not catch it, but your ear most likely will.
  • Do realize that dialogue tells us a lot about the character. Make good use of this as a technique to characterize your various characters and differentiate between them.

Dialogue Don’ts

  • Don’t overdo it with the action beats or dialogue tags. It will make your strong dialogue look weak and the piece overall look like an amateur wrote it.
  • Don’t use it as a way to tell the reader everything. If you can show it in a scene, do so. Only tell things through dialogue when it’s essential to do so.
  • Don’t have every character speak in the same way. We should be able to differentiate between at least the main characters by the way they talk and act.
  • Don’t use single quotation marks for dialogue. As a general rule of thumb, double quotes are the appropriate way to denote something as dialogue.
  • Don’t italicize or bold individual words in the dialogue for emphasis unless it’s absolutely necessary. And it almost never is because you can usually find a way to word things that will make it clear what is important to the character speaking without the use of italics or bold words.
  • Don’t have dialogue that stretches over a page in length. As a general rule, readers will lose interest if a character is on a monologue for that long. Besides, pages of dialogue from one character or even a few usually indicates an imbalance in the writing and telling instead of showing, neither of which are good.
  • Don’t write it exactly how you or someone else would talk. The goal is to write something that sounds like it could’ve been said by a real person without all the extra fluff that often occurs in real, everyday dialogue. Basically, cut all the boring stuff and get straight to the good stuff.
  • Don’t use semi-colons or colons in dialogue. Just don’t. Dashes or commas work fine. Periods too. But not semi-colons or colons.

Conclusion

These should be enough to get you started on dialogue. There are more advanced concepts that I may discuss later on at some point, but if you follow the rules of thumb given above, you should be alright. Above all, writing good dialogue takes practice. It’s not easy, but it is worth investing your time into. So just spend time listening to how people talk and then translate that into dialogue snippets just to practice.

Have a question I didn’t answer? Feel free to leave it in the comments for me. I’ll do my best to help out!

Thursday Technicalities: Dialogue Tags & Action Beats

Ariel Paiement
Publishing Journey

Introduction

This week, we’re going to take a look at dialogue. I’ve seen so many writers do this wrong, and to be fair, it’s hard to figure out sometimes. The rules don’t work the same way as regular sentence rules do. And then there’s the dialogue tags and actions beats to worry about!

Assuming a beginner knows how to use a tag or beat and when, punctuation often gets messed up. More often then not, beginning (and even intermediate) writers don’t know what a tag versus a beat is or when to use them, and punctuation is definitely a struggle.

So, for those of you who have always struggled with this topic or are just starting out and need direction, we’ll break it down one piece at a time and make this a little easier.

This week, we’re just going to focus on tags and beats because that’s already enough information to process without adding anything else. Next week, we’ll talk about some other aspects of dialogue that are important.

Tags vs. Beats

To start out, let’s cover tags vs beats. You can’t punctuate your dialogue correctly if you don’t know the difference because they aren’t dealt with the same way.

Tags

A tag is anything that you tack on the end of the dialogue to let people know who’s talking or how. For example:

“Megan. Megan, could you please calm down and listen? I can explain,” Dane said.

Dane said would be the dialogue tag here. Other dialogue tag examples might include:

He whispered.

She mumbled.

He snapped.

She asked.

The key with tags is to only use them when clarification of who’s speaking or how is necessary. If you use them after every single line of dialogue, it gets really old and repetitive. Consider this example:

“Anna said she couldn’t come,” Mary said.

“Why not?” Eric asked.

“Because she’s busy. Or so she claims,” Mary muttered.

“She’s always busy,” Eric grumbled.

“I know. But what am I supposed to do?” Mary asked. “Drag her out of the apartment?”

“Yes, if that’s what it takes,” Eric said.

Okay, at this point, you probably get the idea. This is not only repetitive, but it just looks like a beginner wrote it. Now consider how it looks with some cuts and revisions:

“Anna said she couldn’t come,” Mary said.

“Why not?” Eric asked.

“Because she’s busy. Or so she claims,” Mary muttered.

“She’s always busy,” Eric grumbled.

“I know. But what am I supposed to do?” Mary asked. “Drag her out of the apartment?”

“Yes, if that’s what it takes,” Eric said.

This second version reads cleaner because I only included dialogue tags where it was necessary. Otherwise, I just let the dialogue carry its own weight. If you have strong dialogue, it will be able to do that just fine without a tag or beat. If you don’t, it’ll become very apparent as soon as you remove the dialogue tag that’s propping it up.

Beats

Now that we’ve covered what a dialogue tag is and when to use them, let’s take a look at beats. Beats are actions that the speaker performs. They go with the dialogue in the same paragraph because the dialogue and the action belong to the same person.

Consider the same example I used earlier but with action beats instead of dialogue tags:

“Megan.” Dane slammed his book down on the end table. “Megan, could you please calm down and listen? I can explain.”

“Dane slammed his book down on the end table” is the action beat here. Notice that you can use an action beat to break up sections of dialogue if it makes sense to do so.

Just like dialogue tags, beats have their own pitfalls. Using too many can be as detrimental to your dialogue’s pacing as too many dialogue tags are. Let’s look at the example I gave with the dialogue between Mary and Eric again with action beats added in.

“Anna said she couldn’t come.” Mary crossed her arms.

“Why not?” Eric leaned against the kitchen door-frame.

“Because she’s busy. Or so she claims.” She paced the kitchen with a sigh.

“She’s always busy.” Eric ran a hand through his hair.

“I know. But what am I supposed to do?” Mary stopped pacing and faced him. “Drag her out of the apartment?”

“Yes, if that’s what it takes.” Eric pushed away from the doorway and stalked off.

Exhausting, right? It doesn’t read smoothly at all, and it’s honestly an eye sore. So how could we clean this example up and use the right amount of action? The key is to use the action beats to help set the scene. They should be reminders of where the characters are or what they’re doing, but they shouldn’t intrude on your dialogue.

If they are, you’ve got a problem. Either your dialogue is too weak to stand alone, or it’s going to appear weak because you tacked on an action beat unnecessarily.

Let’s look at that example again and see how it might be done better.

“Anna said she couldn’t come.” Mary eyed Eric as he came in from the yard.

“Why not?”

“Because she’s busy. Or so she claims.”

“What’s new? She’s always busy.”

“I know. But what am I supposed to do?” Mary crossed her arms. “Drag her out of the apartment?”

He shrugged. “If that’s what it takes.”

In this case, you no longer use so many action beats, but the effect is much better. The middle sections don’t need the support of action beats because the dialogue conveys the speakers’ emotions and intent on its own. But you do need some clarification of what they’re doing on occasion just to remind the reader that the characters are more than talking heads.

Conclusion

That’s a crash course in dialogue tags versus action beats. For those who are just starting out or aren’t completely solid on this, I hope this has helped. For those of you who already know how this works, next week’s article on dialogue may provide more useful information.

I know this can be somewhat confusing at first, so if anyone has questions, please feel free to drop them in the comments below! I or someone else who’s comfortable with the topic can help answer them for you.