TC Boyle Week #5–Dealing with dialogue and tags

          A common problem with dialogue? Too many tags, or tags that are just a bit hokey. Here’s an example of the problem:

“Yes,” she said.

“No!” he exclaimed.

“Why?” she inquired.

“Because we have to get out of the rain and under cover,” he said, inTENTly.

          And so on, and so on, and…. Tags are the words tagged on to dialogue, or, in the case above, “she said,” “he exclaimed,” and “she inquired.”

          The trouble? They sound phoney, fake, and forced after a while. Usually, once the reader knows who the two speakers are, tags can be eliminated, since each new paragraph shows the speaker has switched. But when you DO want to use a tag, here’s one way to vary it:

          I call it THE EXTENDED TAG, and T. C. Boyle is a master of it. Here’s one from the story we’ve been learning from this week, “The Night of the Satellite”:

“You don’t have to put up with that,” Mallory said, and her voice was honed and hard, the voice she used on me when she was in a mood, when I was talking too much or hadn’t gotten around to washing the dishes when it was my turn. “Come on, get in.”

         Notice how he extends the tag to put distance, word-wise, between that piece of dialogue and the next.  It breaks it up a bit and, in this case, gives us added insight into the character. It’s an effective technique if not overused.

Try this:

          Try to find one piece of dialogue in a past sample of your writing, hopefully one that’s tucked between other lines of dialogue. Create an extended tag for it, and, if you like it, let me know about it. Tell me the line you created. And thank you, TC, for one more tool in the toolbox!

Coming tomorrow (Friday) and Saturday: Scott Russell Sanders stops by (ok, a piece of his work does), to teach us about RULE OF THREE, and then, on Saturday, we see how both he and T. C. Boyle BEND that rule!