Tags and Beats: A Great Fuel in Your Tank

We all want our book to crackle with excitement, to race to the finish so breathlessly that the reader can’t put it down. But we still need enough emotional and physical description to make her care about the characters. Just as we’re always told to show rather than tell in our narration, we need a certain amount of showing and telling in a dialogue scene. Every author has a different balance, and that’s part of what makes up their style. But there are certainly some “best practices,” which editors have often reminded me of. The beats and tags we use in our dialogue can propel the scene forward… or bog it down, no matter how snappy the speech itself. By getting it right, we put the best fuel in our tank for optimum performance.

Playing Tag

A tag is simply the attribution of a block of speech to one person or another. “He said.” “She murmured.” Tags are necessary to keep the reader on track with who is saying what. But unless there are numerous speakers, not every statement needs a tag. They do, after all, break up the flow of the dialogue. A little banter volleying back and forth unobstructed between characters can be very effective.

At the other extreme, with no tags at all, a dialogue can read like a fake insertion into the body of the narration, which is mostly composed of documenting people and their actions. Speech is an action (and often a revealing one), so don’t turn off the “documentation” completely, especially during a long dialogue. I’ve read a book (foreign language) that was so extreme in that respect that you felt like you had dropped into a stage play for pages at a time.

But some tags are better than others. What we’re really reading this scene for is the dialogue. Thus the simplest, most transparent tags tend to be the most effective. “Said.” “Asked.” That identifies the speaker quite adequately. If the speech itself doesn’t make the speaker’s tone clear, then add an adjective or a phrase of description. But in fact, the speech itself usually does make the tone clear, so be chary with the froufrou or risk dropping into purple prose.

Feeling the Beat

A beat is a statement of description that is inserted around a quote to guide the reader through the dialogue without saying outright, “He said.” What really gives away the speaker’s emotion is his body language, or for a POV personage, her thoughts. A beat documents what the speaker does, rather than pointing out that what’s in quotes is what he says.

He tapped his fingers nervously. “Is that all you want?” or

I can’t stand much more of this. “Is that all you want?”

gives us a much fuller picture than

“Is that all you want?” he said.

Be able to identify whether something is a beat or a tag, though, because they are not both punctuated the same.

“Is that all you want?” he laughed.

Wrong! Laughter isn’t speech. He may laugh as he says it, but then what you really mean is

“Is that all you want?” He laughed.

Beats and tags both have their place and time. A block of dialogue needs variation. And inner thoughts only work in a close third voice. Some speeches need a visual accompaniment, others reveal themselves quite adequately through the words. One thing that will rarely be necessary is both a beat and a tag supporting the same speech.

He tapped his fingers nervously. “Is that all you want?” he said.

There’s nothing radically wrong with that, but it really isn’t needed. The quotation marks make it clear that he said it.

Zoom on!

With a little care, our dialogues can move as briskly as the rest of the novel, without sacrificing any of the description that draws us into empathy with the characters. Let properly used tags and beats be the nitro fuel that propels you to a winning finish!