🥑 aaaaand ACTION!

If you haven’t downloaded my Thirty Tools to Tackle the Post-Draft Blues resource, what are you waiting for? It’s free, fun, and relentlessly practical.

Quick refresher: a dialogue tag is action that has the dialogue as its subject, which means an action tag is any other action connected to dialogue.

Here are three things to consider when using action tags in a scene.

🥑 Long and short action tags have different effects.

Long action tags draw our attention to the action.

“I was waiting for you.” He picked up his glass, the ice cubes clinking as they swirled in his sweet tea before he took a drink. “But you never showed.”

Short action tags draw our attention to the dialogue.

“I was waiting for you.” He took a drink. “But you never showed.”

🥑 Variation keeps our attention.

He took a drink. “I was waiting for you.”
She smiled. “Oh, were you?”
He set down his glass. “But you never showed.”
Her face fell. “I’m here now, my love.”

That is NOT variation, even though it switches from dialogue to narration every sentence. That’s repetitive paragraph structure with sentences of relatively similar length.

Use sentences and paragraphs of different lengths and avoid using the same structure several paragraphs in a row. On every level—word, sentence, paragraph, scene, story—this variation keeps our interest. Even better, it makes those occasions that you do use repetition more interesting because they’re more unique.

🥑 Tell us what we need to know.

• We don’t need to see every smile, every gesture, every possible action that can accompany dialogue. Of all the micro-expressions and minutiae your characters can perform, focus on the most interesting, evocative, and relevant ones.

• If you see “He smiled” three times on a page, the smile no longer means anything—it’s just filler. But if that smile grows wider or leaves the eyes, that change can inform the dialogue it accompanies.

• If we know who’s speaking, we don’t NEED a dialogue or action tag. Only include one if it makes the story better.

Remember to share this with your writing friends!

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