There’s this really annoying (to me) piece of advice that gets flung around in writing circles about the use of dialog tags. The short is just to not use them at all. Just use “said.” On the surface it’s that same sort of blanket advice that doesn’t actually work and isn’t reflective of real life published work.
From an acting theory, perspective, it ignores that dialog tags are verbs and represent a short hand for actions associated with emotional cues.
One of the things that goes into developing a character is deciding how they react to different stimuli. This is something that applies across all character development theory. But when you’re looking at it from an acting perspective you’re exploring the whole constellation of physical action and space.
When a character walks into a situation whether they express sadness or anger shows you who that character is. If they choose anger how that anger is physically expressed also shows you who that character is. And it’s super easy to absorb this visually, but we can and should apply these same principles to text storytelling.
And that’s where our dialog short cut those things.
“What are you doing here,” they whispered.
Is a different reaction than
“What are you doing here,” they wailed.
Those are two completely different lines that show, succinctly, how a character reacts to a scenario or expresses an anticipated emotion. And it all lives in the dialog tag.
Obviously you’d want to pair with this with additional actions and you can’t rely on the dialog tags to do all the heavy lifting (sometimes you do just need to “say” something), but they act as an indicator of that character’s instinctual first response.
This sort of cross-media character theory can be a useful tool for a writer if you’re having a difficult time visualizing the various elements of the physical expression of emotion. Watch an actor do it. Mix and match your favorite performances and apply them in text.
In an ideal world, we can also borrow other visual storytelling elements from movies and television and translate them into text.
Bright, a Will Smith vehicle about orcs and elves in a modern setting, is okay, at best. It had a lot of problems. But it also has an incredible opening credits scene that uses graffiti and signage to set the stage for the relationship between orcs and elves and humans in this setting. And you see it used over and over throughout the course of the film to highlight the economic disparity between these groups.
Study the environmental and set design of Idiocracy, Fifth Element, Angel’s Egg, Akira, Blade Runner, Battle Angel Alita, or your sprawling sci-fi story of choice and, if done well, will be full of complex visual cues to the nature of this world these characters inhabit.
Look at the costuming and makeup of the Wakanda segments of Black Panther or Poor Things or Cruella or Barbie, and they tell an integral part of the story.
And you can absolutely do textual versions of these things and they’re going to create, objectively, more lived in stories and settings.
Where we run into a problem is readers.
It is a famous problem that there is a very fine line before rolling over into “there’s too much description, I’m skipping it.” And this varies from genre to genre and reader to reader, but it’s an actual problem.
So why bother writing something that no one’s going to read? But also why bother telling stories if you’re if you’re not exploring the entirety of the story space? It’s a bit of writing philosophy.
And our answer comes back to the principles we explore in dialog tags.
Conceptually borrowing from visual media and storytelling while practically applying it with written text best practices. Laying the seeds of the visual design like a flash of scene, then letting the reader fill in the rest as you move through the story.
Pixels and Pins Studio 