He Said, She Said, They Said, He Replied, She Replied, They Replied, How Many Tags Do You Really Need?
Anyone for tennis? Why is tennis important, I hear you ask? A lot of storytelling is about flow. In a tennis match, the players are in flow and the ball gets hit left, right, left, right, left, right and so on until someone scores a point. Your dialogue needs to have a similar flow. If there is a conversation between two characters, it is unnecessary to tag every line of dialogue. An easy way to spot the overuse of tags is to read the passage out loud. Check out these two examples;
1)
“Max, you’re so overdramatic,” Sarah said. “No, I’m not,” Max replied.
“What about last week when you ruined my friend’s wedding reception?” Sarah stated.
“It was only a few drinks,” Max protested.
“Only a few? You and Tyler spent half of the night offending guests and dancing with women half your age!” Sarah fumed.
“We were having fun. Maybe you should try it sometime,” Max reasoned.
2)
“Max, you’re so overdramatic,” Sarah said.
“No, I’m not,” Max replied.
“What about last week when you ruined my friend’s wedding reception?”
“It was only a few drinks.”
“Only a few? You and Tyler spent half of the night offending guests and dancing with women half your age!”
“We were having fun. Maybe you should try it sometime.”
In the first example, we are tagging every single line of dialogue. It makes it clunky and drags the reader out of the subject matter and makes it hard to read and enjoy the story. In the second example, we have established that Sarah and Max are having a conversation and then we have let the tennis match commence. Each character is taking their turn asking and responding in turn to the conversation. This passage is therefore easier to read whilst still allowing the reader to understand who is talking when.
An important point to remember in dialogue is to not overuse it to fill in your plot holes. Just like over tagging your conversations, if you have one character going on a tangent for over half a page filling in back story or any plot holes, your reader will spot it a mile off.
Some good advice that I was given is to avoid small talk and any events that your characters reference within their conversations should have already been acknowledged earlier in your story. For example, we’ve all been there haven’t we? That awkward family gathering where you’re trying to make conversation with an uncle you haven’t seen for twenty years or you’re at the wedding of your wife’s, sister’s best friend’s second cousin and the conversation has died a death. In real life, you’d tend to have a mundane conversation about the weather or perhaps the previous night’s football match before making your excuses and moving on.
In fiction, there is very little room for, so called, small talk. Every conversation needs to have a purpose or it will inevitably end up edited out. And just like our tennis analogy earlier, that conversation needs to be brisk. No need to tag every line. Short snappy back and forth. If a character needs to get a complicated point across, it needs to be in the easiest, briefest and least complicated way possible. Unless you’re giving a speech in front of a crowd, how many of us talk non-stop at someone for a long period without any kind of reply? Serve your opening shot, play back and forth until you’ve come to a resolution and then score or concede the point. Before you know it you’ll be writing dialogue that would place you on centre court at Wimbledon. New balls please….. let’s take your conversations to the next level.
Until next time, write on.
John Roberts