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I like a mix of dialog tags and action tags. You should definitely break up paragraphs of speech with stage business and action tags. Dean Wesley Smith had an advice piece for writers which I ran...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-13T11:59:56Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/1863 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T01:19:41Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/1863 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
I like a mix of dialog tags and action tags. You should definitely break up paragraphs of speech with stage business and action tags. Dean Wesley Smith had an advice piece for writers which I ran across for _Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,_ and I don't have it to hand, but the one bit which stuck with me is "The word 'said' is invisible. Use it." He thought that one should never use bookisms like asserted, insisted, sighed, etc. but I like those used judiciously. And reading back over my own work in chunks, he's right: _said_ is really invisible. It just doesn't register, any more than the word "the" does.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2011-03-04T01:19:47Z (almost 14 years ago)
Original score: 15