When Unnamed Characters Speak

Jenny asks,

Sorry to interrupt a very interesting thread--I swear I read a post here once about handling dialogue when we don't know the names of the speakers. As in someone listening in on a conversation, say, between two women and a man. Like the first time one speaks you could say, "the man with the ill-fitting suit" but when that person speaks again, how would you identify him in a non-cumbersome way? That kind of a thing.

But I can't find the post. If it rings a bell would you mind directing me?

Jenny, I couldn't find such a post. Maybe we did write it and our Super Deluxe Sidebar Labeling System (tm) has failed again. Someday, I swear, I am going to sort out our labels. (Stop laughing.)

So, let's start by setting some parameters. You're writing a secondary character important enough to speak but not important enough to identify by name. (Or perhaps there is some other reason for hiding the name.) That secondary character doesn't fall into a neat character type, so you can't just write, the waiter said, after his lines.

Here's a handy two-step process for making this easy.

Step One.
Pick an active identifier that gives you room to play.

You offer an ill-fitting suit. This is a good choice, much better than a static cue or a common trait. Here's why--

Step Two.
Use beats to draw the reader's attention back to that active identifier.

Let's use your example of the man in the ill-fitting suit. The first time he speaks, you can identify him as just that, the man in the ill-fitting suit.

Now let's brainstorm some actions taken by a man who wears that ill-fitting suit. Does he tug the cuffs? Play with the tight buttons? Hike his pants up repeatedly? Shrug his shoulders when things feel tight?

Use these things as beats in that character's dialogue. It will cue "ill-fitting suit" without being repetitive.

---

"I never saw that woman before she turned up in the diner." The man tugged his frayed cuffs down. "She sat by herself and didn't talk to anyone."

Detective Jones made a note on his pad. "So why did you remember her? You identified her body in the alley."

He popped open a too-tight button. "Kinda hard not to notice a soaking wet, barefoot woman who comes into a diner and orders pie. And pays all in dimes. You remember a thing like that."

----

You see? If you had tagged the nameless character with something more ordinary or static -- "the tall blond," for example -- you wouldn't have all these options for beats. Well, maybe you could have him run his hands through his blond curls. That's a common move, so common the reader might yawn through it. Plus, there might be many blond men in your book. So this might not be unique enough to help the reader keep things straight.

Maybe you could have him bend to get through the doorway, but how many doorways will he walk through in the course of the conversation? You need an identifier that gives you options, that's vivid, and that is unique enough to relate back to only one character.

Theresa

More sentences

Now all I'm doing here is presenting sentence sequences and constructions that I think might send the reader off in the wrong direction or make her squint and backtrack, or break your POV logic. This is just to keep conscious in revision of what the reader is going to get, and make sure it's what you want.

Here's one of those dialogue passages that doesn't use "he said," and the lack of that tends to draw readers in more to the dialogue. However, the reader still does need to be sure of who is saying what.

Example, and I am making the characters "he" and "she" so there's no pronoun confusion:

They stopped outside of a massive block of storage containers, and both of them got out of the truck. Oliver glanced over at the office, where a young guard sat bored behind the alarmed windows. It would do.

"I owe you one." Mary handed him the envelope. He stuffed it in his pocket. "I'll use the combination from high school-- you remember that."

"Kurt Cobain's deathday. Yeah. I remember."

"I owe you one" is spoken by Oliver, but as it's immediately followed by "Mary handed him" it sort of sounds like Mary said it. So how about "Oliver took the envelope"? That way his name is the one closest to the dialogue sentence and, also, it's clearly in his POV (you can say "he" if you don't like using the POV character's name)-- he's the one whose actions (taking rather than giving) matter, as we're in his perspective.

Not a big deal. But stay conscious of the reader's experience of your sentences, and know that you can cause the right experience by how you craft the sentences. The last thing you want is to halt your careful pacing by making the reader go back and re-read.

Alicia

Marks of the amateur-- starting a list

By popular demand--

This is something I'd never really contemplated before becoming an editor, but every editor I've spoken to since knew immediately what I meant. That is, "What tips you off about a submission that this isn't an experienced writer? What are the marks of the amateur?"

Now I don't mean to be insulting here. These marks don't actually mean that the writer is an amateur, rather that we see these mostly in submissions by newer or inexperienced authors, and so we sort of automatically assume.... well. What's important is to make sure you don't inadvertently trigger our "oh, amateur" assessment.

So anyway, when I was in England (very nice-- I want to live there, seriously, and I've narrowed my future home choice down to Somerset, Wiltshire, or the Yorkshire Dales), I asked my friends who had edited what they would put on this list.

Just to get started, and please add on or ask questions as we go:

1) Improper dialogue formatting. That's first for me, because, uh, if you've been reading for decades and never noticed there's a comma after the quote tag and before the quote mark, and a capital letter starting the quote, and the punctuation INSIDE the quote mark, and a new paragraph with a change in speakers, well, you are apparently not really absorbing writing conventions as you read. That will make the work of editing this rather onerous.

2) A whole lot of introductory participial phrases. One or two or three, sure. Sometimes the meaning of the sentence calls for that. But for whatever reason, whenever there are many intro participles on a first page, the submission proves to be a little amateurish in several ways. Hey, I don't make the rules. I'm just reporting.

3) Lynn said semicolons, but really, I'm okay with the occasional semicolon, even in fiction. (Theresa is sighing-- another round in the Great Semicolon Battle.) But more than one or two semicolons on the first couple pages? Trying too hard to sound mature, are you? And improperly used semicolons? Even worse. It looks like a 10-year-old wearing mascara.

4) Clumsy quote-tagging. Everyone agreed on this. I am the most lenient (yes, really-- I am a positive libertine compared with Some Sticklers Recently in Yorkshire), as I don't mind the infrequent "hissed" or "grumbled" if that's in fact what the speaker sounded like. But the default for tagging your dialogue should be "he/she said" or an action.
He adjusted the rearview mirror. "I think we're being followed."
A bunch of "creative" quote tags-- He intoned, she simpered, he ejaculated (I couldn't help it, sorry!), she expostulated, she exclaimed, he temporized-- indicates to me that the writer is more obsessed with the tags than with the actual thing being said by the speaker.

5) More than a couple homophone mistakes (then/than, here/hear, etc.). This suggests the writer is making too extensive use of spell-check rather than actually READING the sentences.

6) Starting the passage with whatever the latest trend is-- an unattributed line of dialogue, a "cute meet" and (this is important, because a good writer might do this and I'd like it) doing it badly. Yeah, those are so old they should be interred with Milton Berle, but I'm still seeing them, and what they say is, "I don't care about what makes my story unique. I want to sound like all the others."

7) Starting with odd stuff that we might put in the published edition, if we got that far, but shouldn't be in a submission (acknowledgments, dedications, a history lesson). But you know, I do like maps. Go figure.

8) Too many names in the first couple paragraphs. Who is the POV character? That's the name we need.

9) POV shifts on the first page. This presages a book full of headhopping that I really don't want to have to fix. Not to mention this must be a submitter who has not read my many posts and articles (and book!) about POV. :) (I am NOT against multiple POV-- but keep it controlled, and open in one POV and stick with it awhile, okay? So I know you know how to do that? (Again, a good writer might have a good reason for doing this, but I'll know the difference when I see it.)

What else? We'll make a list.

Alicia

Quote tag verbing

I'm not one of those who hates quote tags or restricts them to "he said." I like verbs that tell what the quote IS: asked, remarked, commented, observed, shouted, whispered-- verbs that are "say" words (that is, they specifically refer to speech) but are giving the extra info you might get if you were there and could see the facial expression and hear the tone. I also have no problem with adverbs that modify (she said softly) or contradict (he yelled lovingly) the quote verb, as long as it works and isn't redundant (not so fond of "he murmured softly," though I'm sure I've written that :).

So I'm hardly a puritan when it comes to quote tags. But of course, I do draw the line. Now I want you all to think about what you find acceptable and what you find objectionable as a tag for dialogue. (Assume that, for purposes of rhythm and/or speaker identification, you need a quote tag, and an action tag might be too much, distracting from the speech, etc.)

So here are some tag verbs I've seen recently, and maybe you can pick out the ones that annoy you and the ones that don't, and if you have a rationale, let us know. :) Now before or after these is a line of speech, like:
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.
That is, these are TAGS. They are to be connected (like she said above) with a comma before or after the speech. They are not sentences on their own. Okay? And the speech line presumably has something to do with the chosen tag, like "You can't divide by zero," he instructed.

he growled
she smiled
she laughed
he grunted
she hissed
she whispered
he ground out
he grated (what is it with "gr" words? Reminds me of the Crazy English guy who pointed out that most English words that begin with "sn" have to do with the nose)
she attempted
she blurted
he added
he teased
he taunted
she explained
he instructed
he snorted
she sneered
he exclaimed
she lectured
she interrogated
he insisted
he rasped
she muttered


Thoughts? Other tags you like or hate?
Alicia

Finish your action

Going to try to keep this short for once--

Came across this in a couple submissions. You know how you sometimes use action instead of "he said"? You know:

Tammy rose. "You're a fool, Tommy. Bear Stearns is NOT a great investment!"

That's a good way to help the reader keep track of who's saying what, without repeating "she said" ad nauseum (or that immortal pre-war quote tag-- "Wow!" he ejaculated), and it injects some movement into what might be a static scene.

However, the action isn't JUST a quote tag. The astute reader is subconsciously keeping track, and if you have Tammy rising, and then standing up, and then pulling herself to her feet, well, the reader's going to wonder if the chair is following her around and repeatedly implanting itself on her bottom.

So block your action. Yeah, just like they do in the theatre. Make sure if there's an opening action, there's a closing one too. If she rises, she either sits down again or starts moving. If he pulls his cell phone out of his pocket, he should either answer it, make a call, or pocket it again.

In fact, it wouldn't hurt-- well, yeah, it'll probably hurt :)-- to actually write these "internal actions" down separately and make sure they make sense.

Says Alicia, who once had a cowboy hero remove his hat three times without putting it back on. Well, maybe he was a hydra-headed cowboy!!

Dialogue Tags

In one of the recent comment threads, we talked a little about dialogue tags, an entirely post-worthy topic. Dialogue tags are one of those areas where a writer either gets it (in which case tag errors will be very rare) or doesn't get it (in which case tag errors will abound). It's not a particularly complex subject, but it is important. Incorrect dialogue tags can kill the flow of your narrative.

So, let's start with a definition. A dialogue tag is a clause of two words or more which attributes speech to a particular speaker.

"Hello," John said.

Hello is the dialogue. John said is the dialogue tag. The tag makes clear that John is doing the speaking, rather than Mary or Chris or the dining room table. (Forgive me that last one -- I'm currently reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a book in which it would be perfectly normal to have a table deliver dialogue. n.b. Alicia -- you were so freaking right about this book. I should have read it the second you recommended it.)

According to our definition, then, there are two aspects to a dialogue tag.

1. A speaker
2. Speaks

A speaker

We usually think of a tag as a way to identify who is speaking. But there are many tagless ways to accomplish that same goal. For example, you could use a bit of stage direction:

"My goodness, I'm hungry." Mary laid her napkin in her lap.

In that case, there is no dialogue tag, but the stage direction (Mary laid her napkin in her lap) indicates who the speaker is. This is an effective method for keeping the narrative focused and seamless.

Some of you may already be familiar with the concept of the rule of three -- this notion that the number three comes into play over and over again for good writing. There are two applications of the rule of three to dialogue tags.

First, If you have three or more people speaking in the same conversation, you must find a way to identify the speaker for each and every dialogue exchange. Use a tag or a bit of stage direction, sometimes referred to as a beat.

"What kind of soup is that?" John asked.
"Cream of broccoli." Mary picked up the ladle.
"If it's hot, you'd better get a trivet," the table said.

Second, If you have two people speaking, you can go for three exchanges without any attributions before the reader will start to lose track of who is saying what.

John paused before the closed front door as if reluctant to leave Mary. "Thank you for dinner."
"You're welcome. Sorry about the talking table."
"No, the table was no trouble at all. But maybe next time you'll let me take you out?"
"That would certainly be an aid to good digestion."

Most readers will be able to follow the back-and-forth between John and Mary in the above passage even though three of the quotations are unattributed.

So, your first question when evaluating tags is: can the reader correctly identify the speaker through some means other than a tag? If so, you may not need a tag. But in order to know for sure, you'll have to evaluate the other half of the tag equation.


Speaks

Because there are generally quotation marks around speech (fuggedabout Cold Mountain for the moment), the reader already has a clear visual cue that the words are spoken aloud. So when we're evaluating the speaks half of the speaker speaks formula, we're not so much concerned with the fact of the speech as with the nature of the speech.

If you want to call attention to the manner in which the speech is delivered, you use a verb tag other than said. If the manner of the speech is unimportant, use said or use another attribution method discussed above. In most cases, the manner of speech will be unimportant.

How do you know when to call attention to the manner of speech? There are two rules of thumb that I can think of right offhand. First, if the delivery method is an important bit of action in the narrative, then the tag verb should relate to that action. For example, if Mary has ignored her family's entreaties to get out of bed, perhaps they send her nine-year-old brother Boris to wake her. In that case,

"Good morning, Mary," Boris shouted.

would give us something relevant to the scene action. Boris is shouting in an attempt to rouse his lazy older sister. If Boris says the words instead of shouting them, the action of the scene is impacted. Right?

Second, if the manner of speech is contradicted by the content of the speech, you'll want a non-transparent tag verb to highlight that contradiction.

"Boris, you'll have to speak up. I can't hear you over all the shouting," Mary whispered.

Mary is being sarcastic, of course, but the sarcasm is made more evident by the dialogue tag.


And now, a pet peeve

This is the part where I rant about all the simultaneous constructions in dialogue tags.

"I refuse to hold that turkey. I'm a vegetarian now," the table said as it eyed the 24-pound bird on the enormous heirloom platter.

If we've already established the fact of the talking table, and if the rule of three allows it, you can and should edit that tag. (Remember -- verbs are gemstones. Set them well.)

"I refuse to hold that turkey. I'm a vegetarian now." The table eyed the 24-pound bird on the enormous heirloom platter.


There are probably other rules of thumb I'm overlooking at the moment, but this ought to be enough to get everyone started on better, cleaner dialogue attribution.

Theresa