“Drive”, he said.*

There’s a rather long (and it seems to be a teeny bit heated in some cases, honestly) discussion on the ACFW main loop right now about the use of tags in dialog. (Tags, for those not up on their writing jargon, are the little he said/she said bits.) This was a topic that came up at the Blue Ridge conference as well, and I can’t say it’s something I ever consciously thought about previous to that.

The current feeling is that tags should be kept to a bare minimum. One person suggested no more than 15 per novel. Several others agreed, adding the opinion that tags pull the reader out of the story and that trying to dress up your tags to show emotion is violating the cardinal rule of “Thou shalt not use adverbs.”

Now, I’ll definitely agree that not every line of dialog needs a tag. But to eliminate them completely? I’m not sold on that. I flipped through some of my favorite recent reads and I will admit that they were low in the tag quotient – though they did have quite a few action tags. (An action tag is a description of action placed to break up dialog. e.g. “I can’t believe you’d say that.” Martin slammed his coffee cup on the table, wincing as the hot liquid splashed onto his hand. “Just who do you think you are?”) I guess I can get behind that…though there is some part of me that wonders if we are having to describe every little mannerism in our dialog simply to prevent the use of a “said” – I mean really, how many shifts in the seat do we really need to catalog?

All that said, one of the things I’m trying to brutally edit out of my current manuscript is the tags. And in my case, it’s the action tags I’m trying to whittle down. I apparently went hog wild in my first draft and never really readdressed whether they needed to be there. So I’m doing it now.

So, my question for those of you out there in the Interwebs is this: do you care about dialog tags? Do you even notice them when you’re reading? If you do, do you find them distracting/annoying/some other negative emotion?

*If you’ve never heard it, “Drive”, he said. is a song by Steve Taylor and it’s well worth a listen.