Technical Topics -- Tagging with Action

This isn't going to be of much interest to anyone except writers.
Might not be of interest to them either, when it comes right down to it.

Let me natter on for a minute about 'tagging with action'.

A 'dialog tag' is the set of words that tells us who is speaking the dialog.

'Said' and 'said-isms', ('he replied', 'he swore', 'he promised', 'he shouted',) are the most common dialog tags.

"I've made a right mess of this turkey," Tom said, off handedly.

"Let that sylph go," a voice drifted up from the inky depths of the well, "or ye'll get well acquaint with cold water."

"I'm going to erase this and start over," Tom remarked.


I've marked the dialog tag in blue.

But we can move beyond the 'said' and the 'saidism'.
For instance, dialog can even sit there without any tag at all ... the reader just knows who is speaking. That's a very elegant way to tag dialog.

Probably the second most common way to tag dialog is to give us an action that belongs to the speaker of the dialog.

"I'm not ready to commit myself." Tom shifted from one foot to another, nervously.

Bert flung out a warning hand. "Careful. That's a viper pit ahead of you on the path."

Betsy took a reflective lick off the back of the spoon. "Needs more salt."


In those three sentences, we haven't used 'said' or any of its cousins. We've used action. Action tags.

Now some action tags are used very often.
Consider -- he looked, saw, noticed, glanced, gazed, peered, twisted, turned, got up, stood up, walked, sat down, grinned, smiled, laughed, sighed, nodded, shook his head, lifted his chin, jerked his head, breathed, drew in a breath, let out a breath, inhaled, exhaled, sucked in air, gasped ... and so, infinitely and somewhat boringly, on.

There is nothing wrong with these familiar action tags. Careful writers use them all the time.

One trap we fall into, though, is using these stereotyped, twitchy action tags again and again. We can send our characters through a kind of nervous, pointless dance as they grin and raise eyebrows and nod and frown and . . . you get the idea.

One way to avoid the twitchy, overused action tags is to write an extended action. An extended action doesn't flash by and leave the next line to be tagged by another bitty action. An extended action lasts a long time. Maybe the whole scene.

There are two basic kinds of extended action used for dialog tagging.

Action may be 'story action' that changes the outcome of the story. This action goes on during the dialog, but it is also, in and of itself, important. Betty bops Marcus over the head. Chrissy crashes the Jeep. Stacy shoplifts. Mother mixes poisons.

Or the action may be 'stage business' -- stage business is interesting enough, but it's in there mostly to give our characters something to do with their hands. Betty beats cake batter. Chrissy cracks eggs. Stacy stocks the shelves. Mother mixes salad dressing.

Story action is first choice.
Any scene, any chapter, any line, we're always saying to ourselves 'Tell the story.'

'Stage business', as a technique, is neither right nor wrong.
It's one of the writer's tools. But we have to recognize it when we write it. We have to be sure there isn't some 'story action' we should be using instead.

And we have to pick the best, shiniest 'stage action' in the world, one that tells us about the characters or paints a vivid picture of the scene or foreshadows disaster and delight to come
or does some interesting storytelling stuff like that.