Editing Please Don't: Dialogue Tags

Okay, y'all, here we go again. I've decided to take one of my Please Don'ts from the annals of bad fiction writing (lots of it my own in my teenage years; ugh).

Please don't use weird dialogue tags/use actions as dialogue tags.

Okay, let's get something straight. 

"Hello! Welcome to the Please Don'ts!" Shelby greeted.

^^DO NOT DO THIS THING.

I can say:

Shelby greeted her readers: "Hello! Welcome to the Please Don'ts!"

or

"Hello! Welcome to the Please Don'ts!"

But please don't try to make dialogue tags out of action words.

*sidenote: Did I use the word "greeted" because besides being an action verb and therefore not a very good dialogue tag it is also impossible to use as a dialogue tag because it requires an object and therefore cannot be used in any other way besides "Shelby greeted [person]"? ...Possibly.

**second sidenote: I'm side-eyeing you people using this as a dialogue tag so hard every time I read it. Including in actual published stuff. So much side-eyeing.

Let me introduce you to my much-maligned friend, "Said."

Said would like you to remember that it is, in fact, a totally acceptable dialogue tag. For example:

"I was thinking about doing a Please Don't for my blog piece," Shelby began.

"Which of your pet peeves were you thinking of doing?" Matt questioned.

"I wanted to talk about dialogue," Shelby stated.

"Dialogue has a lot of rules," Matt sighed.

"Yeah, I wasn't going to talk about comma usage in dialogue or what order to put the speaker and dialogue tag in," Shelby groaned.

"That sounds like it would be a lot of work," Matt observed.

"Yes, but coming up with trite dialogue for a really long example is even harder," Shelby pointed out.

"How so?" Matt asked.

"I'm trying to keep the dialogue going as long as possible so people can begin to get distracted by the dialogue tags," Shelby explained.

"Do you think that will work?" Matt whispered.

"I don't know, but it's worth a try," Shelby replied.

"Are you running out of dialogue tags to think of?" Matt responded.

"Oh, no," Shelby chuckled. "If I were to bring in other things, like dialogue tags as action words, which I just told them not to do, I could go on forever."

"Do you really think they could handle it?" Matt exclaimed.

"Watch. They might not even realized that I threw a couple in before I even started telling you I was going to," Shelby laughed.

"Well, some of them are very subtle," Matt nodded.

"Do you think we should stop now?" Shelby pondered.

"I think they get the point, yeah," Matt grinned.

"Okay. I'll go back to talking to the readers," Shelby proclaimed.

.....

You back with me? You're still here?

Phew. That was a fun read, wasn't it? Did you get distracted by some of the tags? Did you notice that some worked better than others? Did you notice that I just wrote an entire piece without using the word "said"? Did you notice that it started to get sort of repetitive and that you didn't realize the action was happening with the dialogue because it was all jumbled in there?

Good. You're learning.

Now let's try a different approach.

.....

"I'm back," Shelby said with a grin.

"Oh, good. Do I get to be part of the story again?" Matt asked.

"Of course you do. You're the only other person in this house." Shelby laughed and shook her head.

Matt smiled. "Okay, fine. But we should talk about something different."

"Okay," Shelby said. "What would you like to talk about?"

Matt shrugged. "Anything. How did your day go today?"

"It was pretty good. I worked a lot and wrote a blog piece about dialogue," Shelby said.

Matt sighed. "See, there you go again."

"What?"

"Talking about your blog piece!"

"Oh." Shelby frowned. "I guess it's hard not to do that when I'm still actually writing the thing."

"Maybe I'll tell you about my day?"

"Yeah," Shelby said. "Yeah, that sounds good."

....

Hello again! Okay, so do you see what I'm saying? Action words like "laughed" and "smiled" and "frowned" are set off in their own sentence, not as part of the dialogue tags. What's more, I used "said" a lot more because it doesn't distract from what's actually being said in the dialogue itself. I can use "said" as a placeholder to pause in the dialogue such as in this sentence: 

"Okay," Shelby said. "What would you like to talk about?"

See how that works?

Not to mention the fact that some dialogue doesn't even need a tag. Use them sparingly, use "said" lots more, and stop trying to "spice it up" with weird. Nine times out of ten, it's just annoying.

Now go to, my pretties, and reacquaint yourself with my friend "Said." He needs a home, and he'd love to stay with you if you'll just give him a place to stay!