Sat in on a local author's workshop in Portland and it flipped my thinking on dialogue tags

She spent 20 minutes showing how she stripped out every 'whispered' and 'exclaimed' from a chapter and the scene hit harder without them, so has anyone else found that letting the action carry the conversation works better than the tags?

2 comments

2 Comments

charles_mitchell15d ago

Guilty as charged - my first drafts read like a thesaurus threw up on the page with all the fancy tags. Now I just write "he said" and hope my scene description does the heavy lifting.

markh8514d ago

See I gotta push back on this a little. Sometimes you need those fancy tags to break up the rhythm or show who's talking when two people are going back and forth. Like if someone "whispers" in a quiet scene or "snaps" when they're angry, that does more work than just "said." But yeah, the thesaurus approach is bad. I just think there's a middle ground where you use the stronger tags sparingly, like maybe once every few pages, and let them land harder.