Each week we’re taking five, maybe ten, of YOUR writerly questions and setting about answering them for you.
Ask Dan ANYTHING
Skill level doesn’t matter. Newbie writer, veteran writer, you have questions. I’ll opine; maybe some others will chime in with their thoughts, and hopefully YOU will get several good solutions to choose from.
Or something like that.
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Wanna know what dialogue tags are, and why you don’t want them in your story?
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Wanna know how to create a “page turner” story?
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Wanna know why you need to build an author platform?
And it doesn’t have to be directly writing related. Sometimes you need to get in the writing mood by NOT doing writer stuff. Maybe you wanna know about doing author events, but maybe you wanna know about public speaking, or… I don’t know; the London train system. (I had some trouble there, if you’ll recall.)
Or why so much of Europe requires you to pay to pee…
I don’t want to suggest ideas TO you, I wanna know what’s on YOUR mind.
What are YOU struggling with?
So ask.
Ask me anything.
We have lots of smart people here; if I don’t know the answer, I’ll find someone who does. Or I’ll make something up.
Go ahead, you know you want to.
ASK ME ANYTHING!
Post your questions in the comment section below. I’ll answer the first five, maybe the first ten – so don’t goof off. Post your question NOW!
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Dan Alatorre is the author of several bestsellers and the hilarious romantic comedy “Poggibonsi: an Italian misadventure.”
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Dan Alatorre 
“Wanna know what dialogue tags are, and why you don’t want them in your story?”
Now there’s question which hooked me straight away.
My answers being:
1. Yes please. What are they?
2. If they are roaming in my current book project I would like to know if they needed to be herded out.
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I actually answered the dialogue tag one a few weeks back. I’ll have to figure out which one it was and link to it
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S’ok Dan.
I’ll go scrolling back on your site 👍
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Ginger asked this on August 4, 2017. Here was my reply:
Dialogue tags are when somebody says a line of speech and then we attribute it to them.
“Where is Joe?” Susie asked.
“Joe is in Spain,” Bill said.
All the times when we say he said, she said, he wondered, she asked – those are dialogue tags.
Why are they evil?
They aren’t. But when we see quotation marks, we know somebody is speaking. If we see any kind of action attributed to a person that is attached to that dialogue, then we know that’s the person speaking.
Susie scratched her nose. “Where is Joe?”
See?
Because we have the dialogue attached to Susie’s action, we know she is the one who said it.
Each new speaker’s dialogue gets a new paragraph, too.
Sometimes if there’s just two people talking, you don’t necessarily need to identify them each and every time. You certainly don’t want a back-and-forth like I just showed you.
You also don’t want them sitting around doing nothing. People move and react when they speak and when they hear someone speaking to them.
If your mom screamed your name in anger from the kitchen window when you were in the back yard, you may have jumped. She may have cupped her hands around her mouth to shout the words. All the little things that people do like scratch their head or furrow their eyebrows or nod or rub the back of their neck, those are actions – call beats – that allow the author to explain what’s going on in the story and help set the scene or the mood while not wasting words.
So instead of saying words like he said or she asked, you can put in actions like the ones I just described that basically show the reader the character is questioning something or puzzled by something or disturbed by something.
By the way, question marks at the end of a quote are dead giveaways that somebody asked, after all.
And the biggest reason not to use dialogue tags because most readers skip them.
Readers are smart.
They get it.
And by showing more and telling less, which is basically what a dialogue tag is, we allow the reader to become more immersed in the story, which makes it harder to put down and more of what everybody calls a page turner.
You want that.
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Thanks so much for going to that trouble Dan.
Now I get it!
I must have read this and forgotten the title ‘dialogue tag’, because the advice now registers in my memory and has been utilised in my re-writes.
Not perfect by any means, but …y’know-
getting there.
After all these years taking seriously the approaching to writing and how a reader might see the work!…Yea!!
Thanks again.
Roger
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You are very welcome, my friend!
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I have a question Dan. When you make those little video with Alison and Jen, what platform are you using to do the chat with the multiple screens?
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Back then it was called Google on air. They changed it to YouTube live or something.
It’s free and it’s all automatic. Could not be simpler.
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Oh, so you record through Google Hangouts?
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Yes but it’s not called that anymore
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OH? Are you using another platform for video?
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Nope. I still use it – and occasionally I just shoot a video with my phone and post it on Facebook, if you are referring to those.
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Ok, so you still use Google to video then you can edit it and post to Youtube?
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It’s not Google anymore, it’s YouTube Live, but it’s what took over from Google On Air and Google Hangouts. if you try to use Google On Air it’ll send you to YouTube Live – but it’s the same thing. It’s all free, too, which is nice.
When I did the show with Jenny and Allison, we started with Google On Air and switched to YouTube Live because we had to; they switched us – but I was still able to edit the videos and then post them.
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Oh fantastic. Thanks for your help Dan. I guess considering Google now owns almost everything it’s no surprise. 🙂
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