Better yet, get into the psyche of the character so you aren't playing the 'show, don't tell' game of charades where a character's face is turning red and you have to guess whether they're angry or embarrassed or choking. For example, to continue our example: Bob couldn't stand Jim and his stupid, ugly face. "Go to hell, Jim." is much different from: Bob had missed Jim, and it was good to screw around with the guys again. "Go to hell, Jim." We understand the internal working of Bob in the moment, which flavors the dialog in ways an adverb or even showing Bob executing a variety of generic actions simply can't do. And the thing about 'showing' is that all actions are generic without the inner motivations of why the character is acting that way. It's best to have a combination of inner thoughts and feelings, external actions, other characters acting, the POV character responding both internally and externally. But, in a vacuum, only showing is far weaker than only delivering the internal motivations of the character, as demonstrated above. Without the internal motivations and doings of a character, the external actions of the character and other characters don't have specific meaning. Without 'telling' the internal aspects of a character, you can't have complex constructions like: Bob wanted to tell Jim to go to hell, but had to keep up appearances. "You're the best, Jim." As how are you ever going to possibly 'show' that level of complexity in fiction? Movies have the power of actors to convey facial expressions and body language in a precise and real way. For fiction writers to replicate that, it would take far more words (though people try, describing every crease of a characters face trying to demonstrate such conflicts in what they're saying and feeling). You can often tell manuscripts by amateur writers who're trying so hard to follow 'show, don't tell' because it reads like a bad movie with faceless actors being pushed around a stage and resorts to silly tropes like having the characters talk to their plant about their inner motivations. In a close, limited third person, you can simply deliver what the character is thinking and feeling in a concise, authentic way that in conjunction to external actions creates and replicates the complexity that is the human experience.
Except that is not a dialogue tag. It is a beat. A dialogue tag consists of the speaker's identity and a speech verb. It is coupled to the dialogue fragment with a comma. A beat is an action performed by the speaker before or after the dialogue fragment, or between dialogue fragments. It also serves to identify the speaker, but it connects the dialogue to conccurrent activity in the scene, and can also be used to insert pauses or breaks in the dialogue. It's called a beat because of that shift in timing, like synchronizing to a rhythm in music. A beat is a separate sentence, so it is separated from the dialogue fragment by a sentence-ending punctuation.
Other than sucky what is this no tag style called ? The sun had escaped into a Vampire sky but early evening New Orleans sweltered nonetheless. Xavier and dog wound down the funny named streets of the French Quarter. A woman with purple tinted hair, her green eyes blazing, watched him from her back door as he surveyed the clothes lines shopping for a new shirt. “Get on out of here, shoo, boy, shoo.”
A tag is not always necessary. If there is no need to clarify who is speaking, skip the tag. Save your tags for where they are needed to keep the reader from getting confuzzled. What is it called? Writing dialogue.
True enough. The important thing to note that dialog tags aren't the only way to accurately and effectively attribute dialog. It can get boring if a writer repeats an action/dialog construction over and over, of course, but is definitely a good way to avoid just repeating a dialog/tag construction.
In a technical sense, I suppose. But establishing the speaker of dialog isn't only done via direct attribution, as in a dialog tag. In the example given, most readers would infer it was the woman speaking the line, since the focus was shifted to the woman, so the dialog (to me at least) felt like it came from the woman (and I think that's correct). It's a grey area, though increasingly in contemporary fiction one can see these sort of implied attributions. Have to be careful, though, as it can get confusing and it's a skill to be able to control the reader's focus in a way that gets them to understand where the dialog is coming from without needing to blatantly attribute it. And what I would call that example, in addition to 'sucky,' is overwrought, melo-dramatic language. Vampire sky? LOL.
if you know who is talking to drop the tag if it is more than a few lines of dialogue adverbs are terrible. i try never to use them. they are too much of a short cut and the whole "show don't tell thing"
