Last night I was part-way through a book, racing to the end, when suddenly I was out of the story, looking at the room around me, and wondering what happened.
When I looked back at the story, the actual words on the page, the author had written one of those dialog statements that reads like a question and tagged it at the end with “she asked.”
Back when I was a newer writer, I added all manner of tags at the end of dialog. You know the sort of thing – Mark demanded, she whispered – I’m fairly certain I never wrote he ejaculated. Even to my novice mind, that never seemed quite right.
And then I discovered Elmore Leonard.
Pick up any of his books and open it to a random page. The chances are you’ll find whole blocks of dialog – sometimes pages – where the speech attribution, if any, reads: Chili said, or she said. I’ve read and studied Elmore Leonard’s books and never in those blocks of dialog are you in any doubt as to who is speaking. I learned a huge amount from that study.
It took a while, but I did get back into that story, and it ended as I hoped. I just wish she’d said instead of asked!
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