Note #13: Deploy the Stagehands of Said

The word in black keeps your secrets

“It can be tempting to try to be more descriptive with your dialogue tags” she said, enigmatically.

“But that comes at a price,” he blurted.

Dialogue tags are the way that a writer conveys that a character is saying something — like “enigmatically” or “blurted” above. The worst offender I’ve seen is unquestionably “ejaculated,” which forces quite a different frame of mind upon the reader. J.K. Rowling seems to be especially fond of adverbs — Harry and Ron and Co are always saying things “darkly.”

The beauty of “said” and said alone is that it’s mostly invisible. It functions in a way that’s close to punctuation. Like the stagehands in black who you can barely make out between scenes in a play. The reader just reads it and reads on. When you get a tag with a stronger flavor, it may seem comforting because you’re being extra descriptive, or you’re doing more, but ultimately, you risk evicting the reader from an important moment.

An exception: if the dialogue is being delivered in a meaningfully different way, it’s still valuable to be able to say “she whispered” or “she shouted.” Using those once in a while makes sense but when paragraphs become full of “commented” “responded” “confided” “announced” “retorted” it can have the effect of making the text feel like a text. Ideally, you want your story to feel natural and immersive. At its best, the reader should be submerged in it. A sense that Margaret Atwood captures in the passage below.

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”