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okay so there are three types of writers when it comes to dialogue tags.
the first type writes this:
"i can't believe you did that," she exclaimed breathlessly, her voice trembling with barely concealed emotion.
the second type writes this:
"i can't believe you did that," she said. "i just — i can't." "i know," he said. "do you?" she said. "yeah," he said.
and the third type has been told "said is invisible" so many times they've started doing this:
"i can't believe you did that," she whispered-yelled, her eyes flashing.
all three of these are wrong. (sorry.)
this is what's actually happening in each case.
1. the purple tagger
"you BETRAYED me," he snarled furiously.
the problem isn't the snarl. the problem is furiously. if he's snarling, we know he's not delighted. the adverb is doing work the verb already did, which means you don't trust your own writing. and your reader can feel that.
also: people cannot hiss words that don't have an s in them. "i love you," she hissed. no she didn't. she CAN'T have.
fix: one strong verb OR one adverb. never both. and only when said genuinely doesn't cut it.
2. the said-only purist
said IS invisible. that's true. but a page of nothing but "said" in a tense scene creates this weird flat affect where everything feels equally weighted. the invisibility is the problem, not the solution.
"get out," she said.
versus
"get out." she didn't look up from the counter.
the second one has no attribution at all. we know who's talking. and now we know she's not even giving him the dignity of eye contact. that's CHARACTER. that's free.
action beats do more work than tags. use them.
3. the said-is-dead convert
this one genuinely pains me because it usually comes from good advice received badly. someone told you to vary your tags, and now your characters are interjecting, conceding, deflecting, and sighing their dialogue like a victorian novel.
"we need to leave," he urged. "i'm not ready," she hedged.
hedged. HEDGED. what is she, a financial advisor.
the rule isn't "never use said." the rule is: your tag should disappear, and the line itself should carry the weight. if you need urged to tell me he's urgent, the line isn't doing its job.
the actual framework (one sentence)
ask yourself: does this tag add information the line doesn't already have, or am I patching a weak line with a strong verb?
if it's patching, rewrite the line.
- rin t. ✨
Hey tumblr, a close friend of mine and her family are going through a really difficult time right now. I don't usually share things like this, but seeing what she's been facing, especially alongside her mother and siblings, has been heartbreaking. her mother just created it and asked me to share it!
If you're able to donate to her GoFundMe to help prevent their eviction, it would mean so much. If not, sharing is appreciated too. ❤️:
Since 2022, my family and I have faced homelessness on and off, struggling to find stabi… Leandra m needs your support for Help My Family St
we're overdue for a reactive wave of anti-cozy games. animal crossing but office workers. restaurant management but applebee's. farming sim but all spreadsheets. never see an ear of corn the whole game
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I agree with all of this. But! I think it is also important to recognize that there are subgenres where it is significantly harder to find certain things, and it's actively unhelpful to readers to pretend that you can just find whatever type of book you want to read if you just know how to look for it, especially if you are sticking to trad publishing.
It is possible to find both sapphic SFF and M/M fantasy. It is significantly harder to find, say, aro urban fantasy. Or trans romantic suspense. Or intersex mystery.
A lot of the advice above only really works for trad published or popular books and for identities/subgenres/content that aren't too niche.
So here's some advice if the advice above isn't working for you (either because you can't find books with what you want or because the books you are finding don't end up being the vibe you want), from someone who reads a few hundred books a year:
Find websites or lists dedicated to the specific thing you are looking for. They will generally have more variety and will post you to examples that don't show up in regular rec lists. (ex: aro book recs, ace book recs, intersex #ownvoices database, sapphic books). Goodreads lists can (sometimes) also be your friend.
Get comfortable reading self-published and small press books. Trad publishing has its blind spots.
Check Reddit for recommendations
Start figuring out what it is specifically that you like and then start making your searches more specific. This can be subgenre (if you want urban fantasy, you're rarely going to find it just searching "fantasy"), tropes, plot devices, vibes, etc.
Look at the "readers also bought" on Goodreads/Amazon, similar books on Storygraph, etc. if you read a book you like. Even if you don't end up reading the one you click on, it can show you similar authors (similar to looking at the blurb on a cover), especially because far fewer books have blurbs now.
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sometimes people experiencing psychosis and/or mania will come up to you on the street and talk in confusing or upsetting ways. your job is to either have a regular human-to-human conversation with that person or politely leave. your job is not to call 911. do not call 911. you might kill that person if you call 911.
I don't even have the energy to screenshot and respond to your tags- what the actual fuck is wrong with you? "the cops are scared and rightfully so" "mental health calls are the scariest for cops" OH so this isn't about the safety of psychotic & manic people this is about piggy feelings?
and no, actually, this is not USA specific and no, actually, people from other countries should not ignore this post. police violence and sanism weren't invented in the US and they are certainly not unique to here. if you (or anyone) thinks that this bullshit doesn't happen elsewhere then you are not listening.
This is legitimately useful reframing. A while ago I started replacing the word "cop" in my vocabulary with "a man with a gun." It really puts things into perspective.
This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?
My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?
There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?
It makes it very clear what you're saying. I can call a man with a gun to threaten or hurt someone mildly inconveniencing me. You're not calling the cops, you're calling A MAN WITH A GUN into a situation that does not warrant a firearm handled by a volatile lunatic who will not be held accountable for his actions.
the wisdom ive learnt is that becoming part of a friend group 1) takes a long time and 2) involves a lot of feeling awkward and left out at first. there’s nothing terrible about this but if you grew up chronically lonely or have any kind of trauma relating to social isolation this likely feels Really Wrong and activates danger signals. but both fortunately and unfortunately it’s just how becoming close to new people works most of the time
another thing that was not intuitive to me as someone who grew up an autistic loner: basically everyone on the planet is starved for connection all the time and almost everything people do is an attempt to reach out to another. most seemingly illogical interactions and behaviours can be explained by this. you have to take as many of these invitations as you can. even if you're wrong you still attempted to bring more warmth into the world
i love it actually when nonnative speakers make mistakes that reveal how their native languages work.
lots of koreans online say they "eat" drinks which would assume they only have one word which covers the concept of consumption.
arabic immigrants in sweden (my mother included) have a hard time differentiating between "i think/i believe/my opinion is" which suggests that in arabic these different modalities of speaker agency is treated as one or at least interchangeable.
swedish speakers in english will use should/shall/have to/must with much higher nuance precision than native english speakers, to the point where they sound well awkward, because the distinction between these commands in swedish is much clearer than in english. i make mistakes between is/am/are and has/have constantly because swedish only has one pronoun covering all grammatical persons.
i've heard speakers of languages without gendered pronouns (finnish, the chinese dialects, and a tonne more) make he/she mistakes because it's hard(!!) to learn two or more gendered pronouns and when to use them correctly.
how neat is that?! it add a charm to international english usage in particular and make our appreciation of both our native languages and our learnt ones stronger...!!
i love this! one thing i notice with a lot of people (native speakers of polish, romanian, french and others) is no differentiation between present simple (i go) and present continuous (I am going), because those languages only have one present tense to cover both. it's so lovely every time i hear it
i always think one of the most fun things about learning languages is that it teaches you how weird your own is! especially english phrasal verbs (the very different meanings of stand up, stand down, stand off, stand up to), or trying to explain the difference between being up to something and being up for something to my french friend. I love it!
another tag reminded me of how spanish speakers often mix up /v/ and /b/ because in panish they pronounced identically!
I wish more people had the ability to become bilingual because you're right, it makes you understand your own language at a more intimate and analytical level!!
People whose native language is heavily gendered often apply gendered pronouns to English words that don't have them. For example, my Brazilian sports coach referred to my knee as "she" instead of "it". It's even more interesting when you realise that Old English did have gendered nouns, much like German, and we've essentially lost that entire element of our language.
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every night i sleep in a machine that contorts my body into the exact opposite of gamer posture, and which extracts all the light my screen pulsed into my eyeballs. exactly the amount i spent on food is deposited into my bank account, and my one set of clothes are laundered meticulously. blackout curtains obscure the comings and goings of seasons, and the clock on my computer is covered by a small square of tape. one day i will die, time having managed to creep into my facility regardless, and when i stand at the gates of death i will fail to verify my age correctly and be sent to a penance realm for bureaucrats and petty liars.
