WRITING – Four Things to Think About When Writing a Novel Part 4 of 4

Simpsons Quote:

Bart: “Hey, writers! The Da Vinci Code just sold another hundred copies!” (loud moan from the writers).

Hi. Welcome to video four of “Things to Think About When You’re Writing a Novel”. These are four things to think about when you’re writing a novel. Today we’re going to be talking about dialogue tags and I’m here with my wife, Alesha Escobar.

You can either watch the video or read the transcription below:

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About Dialogue Tags

Luis: I’ve been editing my wife’s third book out of the trilogy, which is of The Gray Tower series. One of them…

Alesha: Tower’s Alchemist.

Luis: Tower’s Alchemist is number one. And number two is Dark Rift. And number three is Circadian Circle, which I’m halfway through.

And yeah, so we’re going to be talking about dialogue tags today and what do I mean by dialogue tags?

Alesha: Basically, he said/she said after a character speaks.

Luis: Yeah. I personally don’t like them. And I just kind of became aware of them in the way that they work without them after I listened to author Michael Stackpole, which – who used to be a – what’s the word. A host of the podcast The Dragon Page where he often gave a lot of writing advice, and one of the writing advice – one of the things of advice that he gave about dialogue tags is this: he’d rather see a character described doing some kind of acting or action and then in the way that a dialogue is said. For example, and here’s like an exercise that he gave out and I thought that it was really interesting. If you could write a dialogue between two characters and the way you write them indicates cadence or accents or expression or emotes and you can just through dialogue know who is talking without having to have a dialogue tag then – I mean, that’s a good exercise that helps make dialogue flow and feel a little bit more natural, right. But it’s just an exercise that in and of itself.

Another exercise he said was what if you were sitting say across the room in an office and you were looking at two people having a conversation between a wall of glass. Like here’s a glass and another wall of glass. You couldn’t hear what they were actually saying at all, but you can tell exactly what everybody was saying and how they were saying it just by the acting and the body language. So if somebody was mad or angry or upset, just through the description of their body language in and of itself you can tell what the conversation might be about, what it’s possibly about, what they’re acting talking about, what the conversation might be about.

So if you’re that good of a description – if you have that much description in the character’s body language then a bit of dialogue might very well be clear at least in an emotional level.

So that’s what I – so when I look and I read through Alesha’s book and the manuscripts I try to find places where you can get rid of the dialogue tags, but here’s the thing…she doesn’t agree with me.

Alesha: I don’t agree with you, Luis. And I’m going to tell you why. Okay, first of all, when you have more than two people speaking in a scene you’re going to have to use tags at some point just to indicate who is speaking. Or if someone who has spoken before has stopped speaking and letting others speak and then they rejoin the conversation I think that’s acceptable. It’s still kind of I guess you would say standard to have dialogue tags, but I do partially agree with you in the sense that it’s not always needed like just straight down the line and I think that’s what you’re trying to say. And there can be times where you would just use body language or description to communicate to the reader who’s speaking and maybe even how they’re speaking and indicating their tone but, you know, I still use he said/she said and I think it’s fine. I think it’s fine, Luis.

Luis: Again, I would much rather read a book that doesn’t. I’ve become hyper aware of it. I just think the pros works better and it feels better somehow. I wish I had the book with me but it’s upstairs with the baby and I don’t want to wake him up. It’s a book called Daemon. I guess the author’s last name is Suarez – I
forgot. I forgot his first name. But I’ll link to it on below but, yeah, the – it’s his first novel and the book is like this big monstrous book like that and there are scenes where there’s a room full in a meeting and people are talking back and forth and there’s six, seven character having a discussion and throughout the entire book, if you look through the entire book, he never once uses any dialogue tags in the entire book. And everybody that has some kind of dialogue is clear who is speaking and I thought, see, it can be done. Like that’s – and it really – you don’t notice it. You just don’t notice that he didn’t use any dialogue tags. I mean, after I read that I’m like, see, it’s possible. It’s possible. It totally works. I sometimes just – it’s just much more difficult not to do the dialogue tags. I think that’s the biggest problem and if you don’t do it well it gets really confusing. So, I don’t know. I mean, that’s what – you know…

Alesha: I think if someone can write without using dialogue tags then go for it, but…

Luis: Well let’s see in the Tower’s Alchemist a section where dialogue tags weren’t used and how it would work.

Alesha: Okay.

Luis: Do you want me to read it?

Alesha: Start right here.

Luis: Okay. So here’s a little bit. I don’t even know who’s talking this time but it says:

“You had to go all the way up north?”

Ken nodded. “So I get there, and I find out that the guy had been guillotined.”

“Ouch…” I frowned. I supposed the SS wanted to break up the monotony of firing squads.

“But I found out he had left three notebooks of ciphers with his assistant before being arrested.”

“Where was the assistant?”

“Erm…in jail, but he was in Mantes.”

“Wait, didn’t you start off in that area?”

“I know, makes you want to punch something, doesn’t it?”

Bernard laughed. “He’ll probably end up punching me.”

“You two know each other?” My gaze went between Ken and Bernard.

“Do I know him?” Bernard shot Ken a quick glance. “If it weren’t for me, Drake wouldn’t know how to make it down the street in Paris.”

So, I mean, the whole time you didn’t use any dialogue tags and it was just like: “Bernard laughed,” you have, “my gaze went to Ken and Bernard” after her dialogue. You know, “I know him, ‘Bernard shot Ken a glance.'”

So that’s kind of like what I’m talking about. Like the entire time you tag it without specifically saying “said” or “I said” or whatever and you just add like a moment of action. And it kind of works like a dialogue tag only you’re doing it with a moment of action. I turned, Bernard laughed, he looked up, scratch – I don’t know. Scratched his head, you know, something. And so, it can be done. It’s just so much, much, much more difficult to do it that way and it can be confusing if you don’t do it well.

Okay. Well you got both our points of views and this is real obvious, so.

Alesha: Let us know what you think.

Luis: Yeah. Yeah. Right now the Tower’s Alchemist is free for the Kindle at the time of this video. I don’t know, it may not be free later on but right now it is.

Alesha: And where else is it free?

Luis: At the iBookstore and Smashwords.

Alesha: Good job.

Luis: Okay. And I’ll see you guys next time. I’m not even going to plug my newsletter where you can download my free book. Go to my blog and find out how you can do that. All right. So we’ll see you next week from Luis.

Alesha: Bye.

Luis: Bye.

VIDEOS – Superman vs. Thor

I thought this was fun. For a fan movie with no budget (?), this is pretty darn good. Enjoy:

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