A beta reader told me my dialogue tags were distracting and now I only use "said" and "asked" 90% of the time.

They pointed out three places in one chapter where I wrote "he hissed" for a character who wasn't a snake and that made me laugh enough to actually try their suggestion, so has anyone else cut down on fancy tags and found it made their scenes read faster?

3 comments

3 Comments

blake_black472mo agoTop Commenter

i read somewhere that stephen king basically lives by "said is dead" and honestly he's got a point, most of those fancy tags just pull you out of the story instead of keeping it moving. once i stopped trying to be all creative with my tags my scenes definitely flowed better, like the dialogue was doing the work instead of me trying to dress it up.

angela432mo ago

It's such a relief when you finally realize you don't have to show off with every line of dialogue. That pressure to find a unique tag for every single spoken line just slows everything down. Once I stopped worrying about it, my writing felt way more natural and the conversations just started flowing on their own.

oliver7191mo ago

Oh man, yes, exactly this. I used to spend way too much time trying to find the perfect synonym for "said" and it just made everything clunky. What finally clicked for me was realizing that the dialogue itself and the action around it can do all the heavy lifting. Like, if a character slams a cup down and then speaks, you don't need to say "he growled angrily." The action already tells you how he feels. Once I started stripping out all those fancy tags, my scenes sped up and felt way more tense when they needed to be. It's like the difference between watching a movie and having someone narrate every little thing over it.