The Writer's Craft: dialogue tags/I love it when somebody's paying attention

[shalanna]

Grade-point averages sometimes blur the big picture.

houseboatonstyx comments in response to a post in my archives that a discussion elsewhere of best-selling writers and their flaws/gifts suggests that sometimes it isn't worth trying to bring all your Cs up to Bs (in terms of flaws in your prose) if it also causes your As to drop to Bs. I thought that was a particularly apt metaphor. I've seen it work that way in many critique groups; the group routs out the problems in a writer's work, but at the same time it damps down the originality and ruins the original voice that made the piece so charming. The revision may be more "official-sounding," but it also may have been pounded into a completely different shape from the original--not always a good thing.

This good observation made me think about a commonly attacked bit of craft that used to be a somewhat standard way of doing things, but is now thought to be "the wrong way to do it." Even the best-sellers of today occasionally pull off a "she said sadly" or a "he exclaimed excitedly." But, you ask, isn't that a no-no?

I used to use a goodly number of dialogue tags myself. If you looked at my first fantasy novel, written about twenty years ago as soon as I got out of college, you'd see a lot of dialogue tags. (I'm just taking this as a for-instance, as my first boss used to say. Hang on for the point.) Dialogue tags used to let readers know more about the speaker's attitude; they used to be a shortcut. (At least this is the way I see it.) This shortcut "worked" for readers up until the mid-1960s, judging from what I've seen in trends for popular fiction. By that time, film was such a useful and "meaningful" way of telling stories (and it had been for some time) that most readers had a filmic sensibility and wanted to read differently. They wanted the fact that the speaker is "alarmed" or "suspicious" to come to them through the character's actions, as it must in film without a voice-over track. (You probably already have noticed that narrators are common in films of the 30s and 40s and even 50s, but they drop out of the picture [pun intended] by the 1960s, when iconic films such as "The Graduate" started using a different vocabulary and telling us things nonverbally. Film always DID tell things nonverbally, but films changed around that time as directors strived for "relevancy" and changed film, like every other art form, to be more postmodern. IMHO.) This filtered down into literature, and soon stories were changing. Dialogue tags, especially adverbial tags, went away, and authors did more showing instead of telling.

(NOTE: Most of the classics that have endured have fewer adverbial tags. Many of the lasting works were already the way I'm describing the post-1930s fiction. I'm not saying that Hemingway, Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, et alia *used* the "wrong" or "old" way. I'm not saying that Salinger wasn't already doing it the cinematic way in _Franny and Zooey_, or that many New Yorker writers didn't already have the hang of being postmodern in the early 1940s. I'm saying that in the bulk of popular fiction, this other way of writing was at least tolerated. Go back and re-read _Little Women_ or _Five Little Peppers_, but be prepared to wince.)

I found that one of the most significant changes I made in my own work, which happened in the late 1980s (sometime after I started posting on FidoNet's WRITING echo, which means after we moved to Ridgewood in 1986), was when I went to action tags or leaving off tags entirely. I changed the general drift from

"What?" she asked. She turned to look at him. "When did that happen?"

to

"What?" She turned to look at him. "When did that happen?"

I found that readers understood the dialogue and action as coming from the same character. Believe it or not, after this change, I started getting completely different responses to my fiction; agents and editors scribbled personal notes at the bottoms of my rejections, and beta readers said my work had started to be more lively and had better descriptions. (I hadn't changed the descriptions, except maybe to make them briefer. That's an example of one change making it *seem* to readers as if other changes and improvements have been made.)

In the "olden days," it was considered more acceptable than it is now to write lines like, "'Why is that?' she asked in alarm." Or even, "'I can't believe it,' she said worriedly." The adverb "worriedly" conjured up for readers a picture of the speaker's furrowed brow, or whatever it was that the reader imagined as a look of worry. It was a "fill in the blank yourself" way of writing, one that asked for more overt input from the reader insofar as what a "worried" person sounded and acted like.

Now you can get away with that only very occasionally. Whether you can or not also has to do with how deeply you are into viewpoint (psychic distance). But for the most part, readers expect you to show the alarm.

"Why is that?" She blinked twice, rapidly, then began fumbling for a cigarette. (Or some similar piece of business that also shows character.)

It's just different. It's not necessarily "BETTER," IMHO, to always show, because sometimes different readers don't understand the stage business you've chosen and will not get the proper sense from what you are telling them. In some cultures, blinking rapidly may not convey confusion or agitation, but may be a way of showing respect for elders. It could merely indicate that the person's contact lenses are drying out or need re-centering. It's possible that it's a nervous tic that the character has developed, and which is used later or earlier in the text.

Various gestures also can be interpreted differently, especially when you have a cross-cultural issue between characters. (It's like with cats--cats interpret a direct stare as a challenge, so until they're socialized to meet your gaze, they often will avert their gazes out of courtesy. Eventually, your domestic cat will outstare you and make you nervous at how long they'll hold the gaze. In fact, my cats used to play the I-love-you blinking game, in which they'd stare at you and then do a slow blink as in "love eyes." That's after they were socialized, though . . . at first, instinct tells them not to stare as a challenge.) In some cultures, I am told, nodding of the head means "no," whereas in the Western world, it's always interpreted as "yes." (Or as a way to get by while you think of what to say or how to disagree with the boss.) This leads to arguments among picky critique group members who want you to write, "She nodded her head yes," instead of just "She nodded." (sigh) It could be that you mean "She instinctively nodded, and kept nodding, although she had no idea what he was talking about." It all depends on your expected/target audience.

It's much tougher, in some ways, to choose something that expresses the correct emotion to most readers. *However*, that's not the way that the buyers (editors and agents) generally see it. So if you want to sell, you have to do it the dominant way. I think that for today's readers, it's definitely the better way.

It's part of "showing, not telling." (The larger picture is "dramatize, don't narrate," which is a better way of saying what is meant.)

P. S. Yes, I realize that the point houseboatonstyx made was that sometimes fixing your flaws can mean bringing down your good points. Occasionally correcting someone's punctuation can lead to making their work choppy. But for some reason, that made me think of dialogue tags and how their semi-painful elimination can improve work without bringing down the good stuff. Carry on.

Comments

Grade point average

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Pasting in from your answer at my Comment on your old post:
Unless the "flaw" is actually an aspect of your style, in which case I agree that readers who don't like that will just have to put up with it.

You're talking about style here, I was thinking on a larger scale. Like, conversation comes easy to me, but setting doesn't. I've been assuming I need to learn setting better and start working it into every scene. But I just got an attack story based on Maupassant's "The Necklace" with hardly any setting details, and noticed his story doesn't have any either. A friend used to tell me to forget the setting, and cited Wodehouse. That seemed to me so mysterious that I couldn't relate to it, but now I'm beginning to wonder if he was right. Maybe instead of trying to learn the usual sort of setting stuff (bring my C in Setting up to a B) I should be looking at how to DESIGN stories and scenes that will NEED less setting (bring my B in Story Design up to an A.)

Which is to say, to bring up a grade point average, you can either work harder at the C's and D's, or change your major to the sort of things you're already getting A's and B's in.

For me, that's a little scary.... It would take a lot of trust in my A's. Can I REALLY get them up to A+'s and if I do, will anyone care?

ultimately you ought to be able to bring everything up to at least an A-minus . . .

That's what someone at the other discussion said. Matociquala's blog I think. But if anyone wants key words to search for, they weren't saying A's and C's they were talking about 'free cards'. Hm, maybe they were thinking about smaller scale stuff too, dunno.

I'm not sure that bringing up those Cs always means dropping the As to Bs .... Sometimes it may mean that for a while, while you're getting the hang of the new way, other stuff will suffer.

Or for various reasons you just have less energy and wordage to spend on your A stuff, if you're filling your mind and pages working on C stuff.

or at least you wouldn't be ruining your good stuff with the improvements.

Well, but what's happening to your good stuff while you're learning how not to ruin it? :)