![]() TIP #4: Replace your adverbs with beats.Īnyone who has attended a writer’s workshop or follows Stephen King already knows the industry’s position on adverbs-avoid them like the plague. That being said, when discussing the topic with Career Authors resident editorial guru Dana Isaacson, he was quick to point out that in “ Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Good Writing,” Leonard goes even further and says, “Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. A good rule of thumb, 80% of your dialogue tags should incorporate said. Thank the stars I had a savvy beta reader (i.e., wife) with the confidence to point out how distracting and annoying my melange of dialogue tags were. Because of its ubiquity and frequency, the tag “said” disappears into the ether of prose where it is unnoticed by readers. I went nuts, with characters hollering, shouting, screaming, lying, calling, mumbling, murmuring, and possibly even guffawing their way through their conversations. My thought process at the time went something like this: “Said is so boring, why not spice things up with descriptive tags?” When I was writing my first novel, The Calypso Directive, I made a common rookie mistake and tried to get fancy with my dialogue tags. TIP #3: When in doubt, default to “said.” “The answer is no,” he snapped, turning to leave. In this example, the tag is “Dempsey shouted,” and the beat is “shoving Munn in the chest.” If this feels like too much emotion or redundant information, you can tone it down by replacing “shouted” with “said” and let the dialogue and the action beat do the work. “I told you I’m handling it, so back off,” Dempsey shouted, shoving Munn in the chest. Dialogue tags and action beats can be used in conjunction with great effect. So far I’ve described tags and beats as if they were separate and distinct animals, incompatible of coexisting in the wild, but this is not true. TIP #2: Mix and Match for greater impact. “I know the truth, but I’ll never admit it,” she said through a sigh. But, if you’re committed to using them as a tag, here’s one grammatically acceptable way to do it:
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