But no words are coming from the woman’s mouth.

A glower has nothing to do with words-a glower is the look itself. The look on the impatient woman’s face? That’s a glower. Imagine the look of a woman behind you at a coffee shop-the one jiggling her keys noisily-when you order a dozen special coffees, each with its own blend of ingredients, and then cancel the order and begin again when you realize you just gave the barista yesterday’s order, one from a completely different group of people than those awaiting today’s order. Not only is it not a way to speak, but no sound is involved. One way to keep readers inside the fiction is to make word choices that fit, to not make choices that have readers laughing in the wrong place or wondering what you, the writer, were thinking-or drinking-when you chose a particular word.Ī glower is a facial expression. There’s no reason for writers to cast them out of the fictional world again and again when with a tap of the keyboard the writer can erase the distractions. Readers don’t need additional disruptions-there are enough surrounding them in their own worlds. But how many times are you going to be the cause of the interruption? It’s bad enough when the kids come running in or the phone rings or we check the clock and find it’s 2 a.m. I’m not saying that readers can’t adapt, because they do, of course they do. He’s instead in his own physical world holding a book or tablet, no longer chasing the murderer or meeting the girl or fighting off aliens.

When a reader has to figure out the meaning of words or punctuation, he’s no longer in the Boston of 1776 or the Paris of 1917 or the Mars of 2325. They may, however, be lost to you.Īny time a reader stops his forward read of the text-he’s confused by word choice, by who’s doing what, by what’s actually happening-you risk pulling him out of the fictional world. If readers are going to wonder why you claimed a character huffed or glowered or snickered his words, those readers are not lost in the fiction. Not if they want to keep readers inside the fiction. It’s not that writers absolutely can’t use words other than said for dialogue tags-because they do use a wide variety of words for attributions-it’s more that they shouldn’t.

Let’s see if we can’t look at dialogue tags and said from a couple of angles you might not have considered. We all want to use what works for our stories and that often means what works best rather than what sort of works. Rather than take recommendations about dialogue tags as prohibitions, consider them as suggestions for best practices. Since we’ve been talking about looking deeper at the reasons behind writing advice (so far a two-part series), let’s do that specifically for dialogue tags and the said issue. The occasional tag beyond said or asked is okay in any genreīut sometimes rules and suggestions simply aren’t helpful when there’s no explanation behind them or no expansion beyond the advice itself. Some genres allow for tags other than said, asked, whispered, and murmured Occasionally we get advice that promotes a situational approach. We typically see an all or nothing approach-īe creative and use any verb you want as a dialogue tag I agree though that those dialogue tags are clunky . . .īecause the said/dialogue tag rule/advice/suggestion generates a lot of confusion and questions and pushback any time the subject is brought up-and I don’t mean only here at The Editor’s Blog, but everywhere-I thought I’d try opening up the discussion by looking at the issue in ways other than through the advice we typically see. You can smile while saying something and you can laugh and distort the words by laughing them. I do it all the time and see it done in my day-to-day life too.

One last thing I wanted to mention: while I don’t use “he smiled” or “he laughed” as a dialogue tag, I never understand that advice saying that it’s impossible to do so. In one of my recent articles about writing advice, a reader posted this question/observation in a comment.

Dialogue tags in a sentence