Dialogue Tags

Sometimes, I think that being a writer makes reading a whole lot harder. I constantly find myself focusing on an author’s sentence structure and description when I am trying to read for enjoyment. Of course, almost every author who has written a guide on writing (and whose guide I have read) says to read, read, read, so taking note of how a published novelist goes about creating his or her fantasy world is certainly helpful. I think back to before I considered myself a writer and the books I read at the time. Back then, I cared little about cliché plotlines and the ever-controversial prologue; now, I find myself mentally critiquing published novels as I read.

If an opening paragraph does not catch my interest, I will give it about a page or two before putting the book down if it is not by an author that I know I like. Even if a book I am reading is by one of my favorite authors, I still critique them in my head.

The book I am currently reading is a young adult fantasy novel, as with most of the books I read for pleasure, and the second in a trilogy. I have read another series by this author, and have been waiting for this book since September, yet I noticed a pretty blatant error about twenty or so pages in.

Sometimes I wonder about an author’s editor, such as in this case. I have noticed numerous places in this author’s work where a period was missing, or a dialogue tag was wrong. This was another such case with dialogue.

Normally, when an author writes “he said,” the dialogue tag is there to inform the reader which character is speaking. I have read guides on dialogue tags, where they say that the tags can be replaced with a character’s action, otherwise “she said this” and “she said that” can get a little dry. If, then, dialogue tags are there to help the reader distinguish between who is speaking, would it not make sense to only have one dialogue tag per dialogue?

I would say so, but the author and editor of the book I am reading apparently have a different idea. For three sentences of dialogue, they figure that three separate dialogue tags of “he said” are in order. It still baffles me as to why someone would need three dialogue tags for a single paragraph of dialogue. I remember what Kurt Vonnegut said when talking about excess sentences and think that it should apply to dialogue tags, too: "Never include a sentence which does not either remark on character or advance the action." (I have been trying to use this line of thinking while rewriting my novel and it seems to work.)

After cases like this, I wonder if I would have noticed three dialogue tags for one set of dialogue three years ago.