Action Tags

http://www.longridgewritersgroup.com/rx/wc11/action_tags.shtml

Writing Craft - Craft

Mary Rosenblum has published eight novels in mystery and science fiction as well as more than sixty short stories in major publications, in all genres.  She also writes nonfiction and is a Long Ridge instructor as well as Web Editor. 

Action Tags

Show, Don’t Tell in Dialogue

by Mary Rosenblum

            Some teacher sometime during your education told you to stop using ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ in your dialogue. That same teacher probably handed you a list of ‘alternatives’ such as ‘he announced’ or ‘she quipped’.  So  you  used them dutifully to replace those ‘he said’ and ‘she said.’  Good, thing, right?

            No.  Not really.

            ‘Said’, while it is often overused by novice writers, is actually a fairly invisible tag.  We note who said the line, but we don’t pay attention to the actual world ‘said’ unless it is used too often.  If the author uses a more specific word such as ‘quipped’ or ‘responded’ or ‘announced’, that ‘saidism’ catches the reader’s eye and stands out, drawing attention to that tag line – which is essentially the author telling us what the character is doing.  But if you use no tag lines at all, readers are quickly confused.  Who said this?  They have to count back to identify the speaker, and sending your readers backward like that kicks them right out of the story.   So how do we show the speaker to the readers? 

            This is where ‘action tags’ come in.  What are action tags?  Action tags are a brief ‘beat’ of action that shows the speaker to the readers.   “I don’ know.”  Jim shrugged.   Who said ‘I don’t know’? Obviously, Jim did.  We are trained to assume that the person whose name follows the dialogue line is the speaker of that line.  So a glimpse of the speaker in action identifies that speaker and notice, there is no ‘said’ or “saidism’ in that action tag.  While you could write the sentence as:  “I don’t know,” Jim said as he shrugged” why should you?  It’s obvious who is speaking without the ‘said’ word, so leave it out.  Empty words such as ‘said as’ weaken your prose.