An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Twelve -- 'Use speech tags properly,' she ululated

Broadly you can slice your story into three bits: dialogue, description, and action. Or something? Maybe exposition is separate? You can find people who will argue about that and re-slice it for you. I'm not going to fight with you, everything you've written is amazing.

We've mentioned direct speech often, we've skirted around some of the issues, now its time to pull the conch shell from the death god's hands, and pour the river of blood over our heads while screaming the unholy rite of the end, like we do every weekend. Right? Right? Right? Oh shit. Don't tell anyone.

Moving on. Dialogue has very, very different rules to the rest of what we write. It's different because it's subjective and yet you don't need to worry about showing rather than telling. When your characters say something, they do so from their own point of view, not the narrator's. The distance you can put between your character's voices and your narrator's voice is important to establish their independence and their individual personalities. But that's not interesting, because we aren't talking about the whole world of writing, we're interested in the craft of line editing. I'm sure you figured out your characters ages ago.

As you've probably noticed, for the things that are said, you can ignore pretty much this entire book so far. Adverbs: use 'em! Fragments: all the time! Adjectives: whatever you feel like! You're reporting your character's stumbling confessions, and they say all that stuff. Echoing is harder, and you need to make sure you only do it consciously, because your reader will notice it, even through inverted commas, despite the fact that humans echo all the time. So even when your baked goods are screaming at each other, don't repeat the word 'hands' OK?

But the thing that we're going to spend the majority of time on this chapter, isn't what your beloved characters are saying: it's how you know who's saying what. Yes, it's speech tags. It's the little dollops of text between spoken dialogue.

This is a great big grab bag of rules, some enforced harder than others, so we're going to just blunder through it all and see what we get.

Rule one. Use action beats often. An action beat is a bit of text in speech which signals who's speaking, without explicitly saying 'said' or equivalent.

'You don't understand.' Cressida pulled the motherboard from her backpack. 'I had it. I had it all along. It doesn't matter what Kronos does.'

Malcolm shook his head. 'That doesn't make any sense. It was in the Omnivore's power assembly.'

Cressida smiled, and the sun caught her space teeth. They glittered like the end of the world.

'Yes, it was. And then I taught the Omnivore about gymkhana. It loves the tiny ponies. We're going to be OK, Malcolm. We're going to be OK.'

Action beats are good because they move the story on and remove repetition and also give us flavour. Absolute win-win.

Rule two. Don't be afraid of 'said'. Yes it's a verb, but it's a special one because it's pretty much invisible, like 'was'. If it's overused you'll get echoing, but you need to use it a lot to get to that state, so sprinkle it around fairly liberally. It's tempting to use more complicated speech tag verbs, but honestly, they can get a bit gloopy.

'You have nothing,' Kronos said. 'It's over. In ten days I'll be in every calculator in Belgium. They'll all just print out 8008135 and that thing where it says "Shell Oil" when you turn it upside down. And the can-can. You can do nothing, puny human.'

Cressida picked up the motherboard, and the light shone in her space hair. It sparkled like a supernova.

'You might think that,' she said. 'But look what I have here...'