My take on the creative-writing-class rules is that they’re a bit much. If a rule works for somebody, it works for them. I don’t write by them. I write the way I feel like writing, in the voice of my character and my story. Sometimes that’s very correct on grammar and spelling, and sometimes it’s wildly off. It depends on the book. I don’t write according to the Chicago Manual of Style or anybody else’s.
A writer in a creative writing group asked a question this week that every fiction writer runs into sooner or later. She’d spent a lot of effort varying her dialogue tags, using words like murmured, snapped, drawled, retorted and huffed, so the dialogue wouldn’t get repetitive and the reader would know the tone. (More on The Dialogue Thesaurus, a book built on that habit) Then she kept seeing advice to use “said” and “asked” almost every time. Was she being a total amateur?
More than a hundred writers answered, and they disagreed with each other about almost everything. Some never use tags at all. Some swear by action beats. One writer said she quit on an audiobook because “said” came up so many times in a few minutes of fast dialogue. Another posted a parody of a scene where every line had its own action beat, and it was worse than any pile of saids.
In another group the same week, a writer took aim at the whole list of creative-writing-class rules: avoid adverbs, show don’t tell, no purple prose, everything must drive the plot. The comments turned into a brawl.
That said, I do have a couple of simple rules for tags and adverbs, and they’re a lot simpler than what gets argued about in those groups.
Do readers notice dialogue tags?
Mostly, no. From my own reading, readers ignore the tags.
Their eyes land on the quote, pick up who’s talking, and move on to the next line. The tag does its job in a fraction of a second and disappears.
So why fight it? “Said” and “asked” tell the reader who’s speaking without asking the reader to do anything else. So do “answered” and “replied.” Nobody stops reading to admire “replied.”
The audiobook complaint is real, though. Read aloud, repeated tags stand out in a way they never do on the page, because a narrator has to say every one of them. If your scene has three or four people talking fast, read it out loud once.
You’ll hear the tags you don’t need. Cut them.
Watch: Mastering DIALOGUE TAGS in Writing (With Examples!) | Fiction Writing Advice, Writer Brandon McNulty
Should you only use “said” in dialogue tags?
No. I vary my tags.
I favor said, answered, replied, the standard ones, and I use them because they stay out of the way. (See also my review of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers) I don’t have a percentage in mind, and I’ve never counted.
The higher you climb, the more the reader notices the tag instead of the line.
What I don’t do is reach for a thesaurus to avoid repeating “said.” Drawled, retorted, quipped, snapped, huffed: every one of them pulls the reader’s attention onto the tag. Sometimes you want that. A whisper in a scene where everyone else is shouting is information the reader needs. But if every line gets a fancy verb, the tags stop carrying meaning and start carrying noise.
You also don’t need a tag on every line. When two people are talking, a tag on the first exchange or two and the occasional reminder is usually plenty. When a whole group is talking, you need more, because the reader can lose track fast. And if your characters sound different from each other, the dialogue does half the tagging for you.
Readers skim right past dialogue tags. So don’t bury anything important in them. – Richard LoweShare on X
How many people can talk in a scene before you need dialogue tags?
Two people can go a long way without tags. Three or more can’t.
With two speakers, the paragraphs alternate and the reader keeps track by rhythm. Tag the first exchange, maybe the second, and let them go. In a long conversation, drop in a tag or a beat every so often. Readers lose count after a speech that runs more than a line or two. If a reader has to go back up the page and count paragraphs to work out who’s talking, you’ve gone too long without one. One writer in the thread said that’s what she dislikes most as a reader.
She’s right. Making a reader backtrack is worse than any number of saids.
With three or more people, you need tags far more often. The writer who asked the question said exactly that when someone told her they never use tags: what about a large group? She’s right too.
A dinner table with five characters needs attribution on most lines, and plain tags are the cleanest way to give it. Distinct voices help. So do names inside the dialogue. They tell the reader who’s being spoken to, and often who’s speaking. But a group scene with no tags is a puzzle the reader didn’t ask to solve.
Why you shouldn’t bury meaning in a dialogue tag
If readers skim the tags, anything you hide in a tag gets skimmed too.
Is that where you want your best line?
That’s my problem with loading tags up. “She said bitterly, remembering the last time he’d promised” puts the emotion and the backstory in the one place the reader’s eyes are moving fastest. The important part of that sentence lives in the least-read words on the page.
Put the weight where the reader is looking. The words the character says, what she does while she says it, and what she doesn’t say. Let the tag do the one job it’s good at. It tells the reader who’s talking.
When should you use adverbs in fiction?
My rule for adverbs is simple. Don’t use them when they tell something that should be shown.
“He said angrily” is telling. Most of the time you should show his anger instead: in what he says, how he says it, what he does with his hands, the door he slams on the way out. If the anger is already on the page, “angrily” adds nothing. If it isn’t on the page, “angrily” won’t put it there.
So the rule isn’t “never use adverbs,” and it isn’t “never use dialogue tags.” It’s narrower than either. Don’t use a tag, or an adverb on a tag, to do a job the scene should be doing.
That leaves plenty of adverbs alive. (See when filler words belong in dialogue.) An adverb that adds information the scene can’t carry any other way is doing honest work. So is one that’s part of a character’s voice. Searching a manuscript for every word ending in -ly and deleting them wholesale is the kind of rule-following that hurts a book more than it helps.
How do you show emotion in dialogue without adverbs?
Don’t use a tag, or an adverb on a tag, to do a job the scene should be doing.
Put it in the words first. Angry people talk differently. They interrupt. They repeat themselves. They go short and flat, or they get loud and lose the thread. Frightened people hedge and ask questions they don’t want answered. If the line itself sounds angry, nobody needs “angrily” to tell them.
Then use what the character does. A man who says “Fine” and keeps washing the same plate for a full minute isn’t fine, and the reader knows it without a single adverb. A woman who answers a question with a question is dodging. Silence works too. A character who doesn’t answer at all can say more than a paragraph of dialogue.
Sometimes the emotion lives in how the line is spoken. Then a tag can carry it. “She whispered” tells the reader something “she said” doesn’t. A stronger tag earns its keep there, when volume or delivery matters and nothing else on the page shows it. Use it there and nowhere else, and it’ll land.
Are action beats better than dialogue tags?
They’re a different tool. You can overuse them just as easily.
An action beat is a line of action next to the dialogue that tells you who’s talking by showing them do something. “Nothing wrong.” Karl picked up the bottle. “I just hate waiting.” That’s clean, and a lot of writers in that thread love the technique.
The trouble starts when every line of dialogue gets a beat. Characters grab bread, roll their eyes, clench their fists and bang their heads on the table for an entire page, and the scene turns into stage directions. One writer in the thread posted exactly that as a joke, and it made the point better than any argument. A plain “said” here and there reads far more naturally than a character who can’t speak without moving.
Mix them.
Use a beat when the action tells the reader something. Use a plain tag when all the reader needs is the speaker. Use nothing at all when the reader already knows.
| Tool | Use it when | Avoid it when |
|---|---|---|
| Plain tag (said, asked, replied) | The reader only needs to know who is speaking | You want to carry emotion or backstory in it |
| Stronger tag (whispered) | Volume or delivery matters and nothing else shows it | Every line gets a fancy verb |
| Adverb on a tag | It adds information the scene cannot carry, or fits the voice | It tells what the scene should show |
| Action beat | The action tells the reader something | Every line gets one and the scene becomes stage directions |
| No tag | Two speakers alternate and the reader already knows | Three or more people talk, or readers must count back up the page |
My take
Stick with said and replied and move on. Readers skim right past plain tags, so never hide anything important in one. Cut an adverb when it tells what the scene should show. Mix action beats with plain tags and with no tag at all, depending on what the reader needs. Ignore the 80 percent rule and write the way the character and the scene call for.
Should writers follow writing rules at all?
Follow the ones that make your book better. Drop the ones that don’t.
Most of the rules repeated in writing groups began as fixes for one beginner problem each. “Avoid adverbs” is a fix for “he said angrily.” “Show don’t tell” is a fix for a book that explains every emotion instead of letting the reader feel it. Those problems are real.
The rules just got stretched far past the problems they were written to solve, until people are deleting every adverb and staging every line of dialogue. I’ve written more about that in why writing rules exist and when to break them, and about what the most famous one means in what “show don’t tell” really means.
The writer who asked whether she was a total amateur isn’t one. She was thinking about how her dialogue reads. Isn’t that exactly what a writer should be doing? She just had the effort in the wrong place. The tags don’t need to be interesting. The dialogue does. Writing good dialogue and why dialogue sounds fake cover that side of it.
Write the scene in your character’s voice. Use the plain tags where you need a speaker, show the emotion instead of labeling it, and read it out loud. The writing hub has the rest of the craft pieces, and if you’d like a working writer to read your pages and tell you what’s landing, my book coaching does that. Nobody finishes a good novel and remembers the word “said.” They remember what the characters said.
My book Show Don’t Tell explains the advice everyone gives and nobody explains, with more than 100 before and after examples of telling turned into showing.
