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Dialogue-Action Tags

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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.

Two Birds With One Stone

Action tags do more for your dialogue than to simply eliminate those pesky 'said' tags. They also allow you to continuously remind the readers of your visual setting, so that you can create the effect of seeing and hearing that conversation simultaneously, just as we do in real life. When a novice writer creates dialogue with no visual details, the readers begin to hear people talking in a gray fog, creating what is called a 'talking heads' scene. Readers quickly forget where we are and what we see unless reminded regularly.

In addition, a character's body language - those small physical movements and facial expressions - reveals his or her emotional state. The character's emotional state not only affects the meaning of what he or she says, it also colors that person's tone.

Let's look at an example:

"Hi," Jane said. "Nice to see you."

"How long has it been?" Daren asked. "Two years?"

"More like three," Jane admitted. "How have you been?"

"Okay," Daren responded. "I missed you, you know. You didn't leave me any note or anything. You just left."

"Yeah," Jane said awkwardly. "You know. I was just reacting."

So here we have a conversation between Jane and Daren. Obviously this has some emotional intensity. These people haven't seen each other for quite some time and we find out that Jane left suddenly and Daren missed her. Perhaps they were romantically involved. However we have to fill in a lot of the emotional tone here on our own. Is Daren angry? Is Jane embarrassed? Or is Daren hurt? Maybe Jane is afraid of him, he was an abusive boyfriend? We don't know. We are guessing what the situation might be and then filling in a lot of blanks in terms of the character emotions. We readers are doing all the work here - and we might get it wrong. We might completely misinterpret the author's intention here.