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Reading Assignment: “Collision” and “Mrs. Galvin” chapters from Teardrop Road
The Vanishing Tag
This is the lesson I have heard when it comes to dialogue: Don’t tag too often. Don’t get too specific with your tag.
First, let’s define tag. A tag is very simple. He said is a tag. We have all seen them a million times. Remember that. We will get back to that.
Tags are a necessary evil, and often in books, they are used wrong. We writers, when we decide it is time for a tag, we think said is too boring, or not descriptive enough, so we add an -ly.
“This is an adverb and we writers, as a tribe, seem to be in love with them,” he said doggedly. “They don’t love us back.”
When I wrote the sentence above, the thing you took away from it was the word doggedly. That is the main point you retrieved from the dialogue. But it is not only -ly we need to burn to the ground.
“Let’s look at the -ed as well,” he said, annoyed.
Same thing. Still jumping in asserting itself, still obnoxious, still distracting.
Every successful writer will tell you not to use them, but rarely are we told why. The reason we need to leave adverb out is because it calls attention to itself. An adverb is obnoxious. It interrupts everything it is attached to. It steps into the sentence and jumps up saying, “Look at me! I’m here and ready to bear.” They draw away attention from the real drama of the story: the words being spoken. What we need is a tag that is chilled out.
I have three dogs. One is named Jordai. He is pretty cool. Always patient, always calm, always a gentleman. When food is brought out, he will sit and wait. When a treat is being given, he is in the back, letting the other dogs go first. He is happy and laid back most all the time. He is a said.
Sadie is an adverb. She is a rottie, and when it is time for a treat, she will shove every other dog out of the way and stick her nose in. If Jordai is at the back door and we go to let him out, she will shove him out of the way and leave the house first. This is partially because she is the alpha of the other dogs, but largely because she is rude. This is the way an adverb, or any other obnoxious tag, asserts itself.
A good piece of dialogue will always get its point across without the help of an adverb.
The fun thing about a tag is that a good one vanishes immediately. It is an illusion, nothing more. Now let’s look at this piece of dialogue I wrote:
“You are Peter Redfist?” he asked.
“I am,” Peter said.
“My father told me you were to be my king,” the boy said. “He told me I would serve you as your warrior and commander, said you would treat me with honor and power.”
Now this is the beauty of a vanishing tag. When readers see he said, she said, he asked, and she asked, they ignore them. Just as quickly as they come, they are gone. These tags are so common, so everyday, that as soon as they appear, they are dismissed.
Adverbs don’t do that. Adverbs are remembered. So when you use an adverb, you are breaking your dialogue apart and taking the reader away from it, then shoving them back in. A good piece of dialogue does not need a description word because the tone of voice, the mood of the speaker and the inflection are all betrayed by the words said, not the tag.
Now without going back and reading the last sample, try to remember what was said. Most likely, you can. Now try to remember where the tags were. Try to remember, as if you had to place them back, where the words the boy said were in the sentence. Most likely, you cannot. The words vanished as soon as you read them. We have all seen these words a million times, so we don’t even notice them anymore.
With the vanishing tag, we can inform the reader who is speaking without breaking in on the sentence at all. Everyone understands who has spoken without being dragged out of the scene.
You read “Collision” for this particular class period. It’s a story of when many of the Degenerates were in a car accident together. There is a lot of dialogue. Katty calls me, we talk on the phone. I get to Jammy’s house and there’s an entire conversation. I call Chanel and there is an entire conversation on the phone. Then when I get to Chanel’s house there’s an entire conversation between me and Chanel. All of it is done with he said, she said, Jammy said, Katty said. A couple of things here are working in my favor.
One is the mood of the piece. There’s a kind of frantic sadness. It lays over everything that is present in the story itself. For instance, I don’t need to add ‘worriedly’ because the subject matter and the atmosphere of the story takes care of that for me. Also, I don’t need to explain how I am saying the thing, because the topic I’m talking about brings a certain kind of attitude to everything I say. If I was talking about a baseball game I had recently watched and my team had won, one, that would be extremely out of character because I hate baseball, but two, you could assume by the things I was saying that I was excited. The pace of the writing would be quicker. All of it, it would all be, everything I wrote and everything I described, would lend itself to you understanding the tone in which the dialogue is being spoken.
What I’ve done in “Collision” is I’ve created an atmosphere and a tone that work as my adverbs all by itself. I’m there and I’m worried and I’m sad and I’m shocked, stunned to silence. So all those things come through because of the way I’ve described the situation. If you describe a scene in which you’re at a funeral, you don’t need to add the word solemnly or sadly because you’re at a funeral. What has happened here is the setting has taken the place of the adverbs used in the dialogue.
Also, you have a speech pattern that takes care of your tags. So I can say things like he said, or I said, or she said, because Chanel speaks with a different kind of speech pattern than I do. She would say a thing completely different than I ever would. So if for instance, Jammy and Katty and me and Chanel are standing on Chanel’s porch, and the piece of dialogue is “show me the cast, I wanna write a poem on it.” You can assume that is being spoken by one of the two writers that are on the porch, just because of the content of the dialogue. At that particular point, what else do I need to say except he said, or she said? She said, that applies to Jammy and only Jammy because Jammy’s the only writer. I don’t have to differentiate between Jammy and Chanel or Katty because the only person who writes poems is Jammy. So a simple, she said, will work here. And because you know the characters, you know which one is speaking.
Now, all that is nonsense because I’m pretty sure that at the time that particular piece of dialogue is spoken, I’m the only one on the porch, but it doesn’t change the fact that all I need to write is he said or I said.
At one point you have four different people in the same scene and a lot of dialogue being spoken. Me, Katty, Jammy, and Chanel are all on the porch at the same time. Whenever you have dialogue in a room full of people, things can get really hectic.
I remember in a certain scene I wrote in the book Hemlock, there are seven different people in the room. Three of them are in the middle of a conversation and the others are all doing something important. The tags of Saykobar said, Aaron said, Sabrar said, Demetri did this, Oak did this, it all gets to be too much for the reader. And after a while of small lines of conversation with the tag of the name of the person, you get six or seven of those in a row and you’ve created a rhythm that just repels readers.
So you have to think, when you’re writing a piece of dialogue that’s taking place in a room full of people, you have to think about how a certain person speaks that’s different from everybody else, and what they’re talking about and their viewpoint on it that’s different from everybody else, so that you can go sometimes for speaker after speaker without having to throw on a tag. I guess what I’m saying is content and characterization is often enough of a tag where you won’t need one, or you could just use he said, she said. By content, I mean what is being said, (let me write a poem on your cast), or how it’s being spoken.
The best example of that I have is there’s a part in “Collision” where I’m standing in Jammy’s house and I say, “First things first, we have to get to Chanel, we’ve gotta regroup.” The content of that line declares it is being spoken by the leader. As I am the leader, it isn’t confusing who’s speaking, so I don’t need an elaborate tag.
The vanishing tag, the he said, she said, boy said, king said, the vanishing tag gets out of the way of the dialogue so that the dialogue can get across who’s speaking and not distract from the words being spoken.
I’m gonna show you a video now. The whole video is a piece of dialogue. It’s a folk song written in the 50s, then covered by Joan Baez. Then in 1969 covered again by Led Zeppelin. This video is another cover by a band called Great White done in the same style as Led Zeppelin’s cover. As you can see, it’s a great song we’re about to watch. Everybody wants to leave their mark on it. We’re gonna watch the Great White version, because it was the first version I saw and it had a powerful, emotional impact on me.
At the time when Led Zeppelin covered this song, the younger generation of those days were confused by the clashing of what they had been taught during their childhood against what they thought and believed as young adults. And you had an entire young culture that was going out and trying to find where they belonged and who they were as they journeyed through America. They would get together in a couple of groups and one of them would walk off with a person they’d never met, and that person would become the most important person to them for a week. Then they’d join another group and move on.
They were all searching for something. They were looking for themselves and they were looking for their place in the world. You had a term that showed up in the culture, it was called rambling. He’s a rambler, she’s a rambler, he’s gotta ramble. The concept of rambling was you meet up with somebody, you find happiness, but you don’t find yourself in it, so you get up and take off and you ramble on to the next setting and the next important person in your life.
You can find this idea in a lot of the movies of the time, of the 60s and 70s. The concept of somebody moving from place to place as they try to search for themselves by leaving one setting and joining the next, and finding out what beliefs and understandings about the world followed them, versus what was created by the setting they just left.
Now, in the video I’m gonna show you, it’s a complete monologue about a person telling their lover that they have to leave, they have to ramble, go on alone. There’s no names except Babe. There’s few descriptions of how they feel. All of it is betrayed by the music, but more importantly, the voice and the words being spoken by the singer.
In order to perform this song you have to sing it in a certain way. There has to be a whine and a moan. And desperate pain. Emotional anguish at the idea of leaving this particular person. From certain things being spoken, walking in the park, holding hands for instance, you can tell that even though this person has to ramble away from somebody they love, we are talking about two soulmates here. And that pain of the entire era of American history is captured here. In order to find themselves, they often had to leave the person they loved the most.
I’m gonna do one more thing, I’m gonna tell you one more story. It may be in my autobiography, it may not be. I’ve told so many stories in my autobiography. It’s hard to tell how much of myself I’ve exposed.
I met up with this girl once. We’re gonna call her Raspberry. She was visiting from out of town with my sister. I was only seeing her for a weekend. We spent the weekend every night, she would sing to me and I would tell her stories outside in the grass, under the moon. At that point in my life, I had never met anybody like her, because she wasn’t looking for stability in love. She was looking for what her mother and father had.
One day her father had just pulled up, looked at her mom on his way through town, and asked if she wanted to get on his motorcycle and take off with him. And she did. They rode from Missouri to Colorado and spent a week together. The two climbed a mountain together and on one of the shelves in the mountain, they camped, they made love, and Raspberry was conceived.
But he was rambling across the country and they ended up separating before he found out she was pregnant. Her mother never loved another man, spent time with another man, had a relationship with another man. They were soulmates. And that’s what Raspberry was looking for. She wanted to connect with one person, love them intensely, and then vanish from their life forever, and hurt for them for the rest of her life. She was obsessed with rambling.
She didn’t get what she wanted from me. I gave her one small parting kiss and never saw her again. I was not her drifter. I was not the man who was moving through her life and taking her heart with me when I did. But that was what she was looking for. That’s what she had grown up with.
So I’m gonna play the song for you. I want you to keep in mind that the only word the person uses to describe who they’re talking to is every now and then they’ll say girl or woman. But all of the adverbs, the emotional tone, the setting, all of it is captured perfectly in the monologue and the mood of the music. The mood of the music works the same as a setting.
I’m not showing you the Led Zeppelin version, I’m showing you this version because I feel like the acoustic guitar captures the emotion better. So here is “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” in the style of Led Zeppelin, performed by the band Great White.
The music being played and the tone of his voice while he’s speaking along with the things he’s saying in that video betray the scene completely. He starts by telling her he’s gonna leave her. It’s just him and a very calm guitar part. Then there’s an explosion with the drums and the bass. She’s arguing, they’re fighting. She stops arguing, he keeps talking about how he’s leaving. You could even say that the small solos the guitar plays between his lines are her talking back to him, begging him to stay.
The reason I show this to you is because this video is perfect for the Vanishing Tag and the concept that you do not need adverbs to get your point across, because it’s the moaning whine of the way he says what he says that betrays his emotion, along with the actual words he’s saying and the content of his monologue. Most of the time if you’re doing your job right, if you’ve created the character you need to create, a character unique and different enough to speak in their own way, and if you’re meticulous about the words you choose, the words you choose can betray the emotion and you don’t need to use adverbs at all.
But there’s one time when you might want to. This is a wily trick that I don’t use often but I do use occasionally. The concept is pretty basic. If you’re doing dialogue correctly, as I’ve already said, you should be using words that only that character would use, speaking content only that character would speak. And you don’t need an elaborate tag, and you don’t need adverbs. And you have a character everybody knows and can sympathize with, or they know and they can understand. They have some kind of connection with that character, because they know what that character would say and what they wouldn’t. And they know exactly how that character is saying the things we’re saying. Very simple. We just talked about it.
But what if you don’t want them to sympathize with a certain character and you don’t want them to identify with that character at all? What if you want them slightly annoyed when that character speaks? It’s gotta be a minor character, but if you choose to throw in some adverbs right then, then the reader wouldn’t be able to enjoy the things being spoken by that character. They wouldn’t want that character on the page. And you can control the way they feel by using adverbs only when that character is speaking.
It’s risky and you’re not gonna want to do it a lot. But it’s just like the passive voice concept. You use passive voice between two big action scenes to slow everything down and lower the intensity. The same thing can be done here with the use of adverbs. You can dictate how the reader feels about a certain character simply by using a few adverbs. Again, I want you to use this very rarely if ever. And even when you do, use it extremely sparingly. But if you’ve mastered dialogue to the point where you don’t need adverbs, you can choose when to use them and when not.
Now I suppose we have to talk about adverbs that aren’t adverbs. An example, let’s see, if I’m talking to you and you’re writing everything down, and I get really aggressive during a certain part of my lecture, passion overtakes me and you’re trying to get that across to the person who’s reading what you’re writing, you could write, “he said, slamming the table with his fist.” That’s an adverb that’s not an adverb. You did not get your point across with the words spoken, so you add a description of an action that gets your point across.
Everybody does this. But if you had chosen the correct words and you had used an emotional description of the scene, the emotions in the room, descriptions of the way I was holding my head, staring out into the rest of the class, you wouldn’t have had to throw that fist pound in there to get your point across in my dialogue.
We’re not gonna spend a lot of time on this but, basically when you’re writing, I want you to take a look at everything you do around your dialogue in order to decide if you’re using hidden adverbs or adverbs when you could be strengthening the setting or using more identifying words that your character would speak.
Four different ways to fold a letter. Because there were four different letters I could send. There was the love letter. I swore I would only need that one, but Grr slapped my arm and said, “Be serious here, Joe. I am trying to teach you how to communicate. What is this?”
She held up the next folded piece of paper. “That is a comedy letter,” I said.
“Right, and it better be funny.” Grr rolled her eyes and sighed. “Jeep’s never are, but he is a chore.”
I use an adverb that’s not an adverb in this scene right here. I describe her hitting me, slapping me, swatting at me, as she talks about the comedy letter. I just wanted to show you an example, however this is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. If you really look at that spot in the work, you can see that it is a perfect and seamless transition from description and exposition into dialogue that takes place right as she hits me. It’s a perfect bridge between the two, exposition straight into dialogue. I’m personally very proud of it. I think it’s pretty graceful. However, it gets my point across perfectly here. She didn’t need to hit me to show how aggravated she was getting with me. The dialogue did it itself. “Be serious here, Joe. I’m trying to teach you how to communicate.” That line itself shows how agitated she’s getting, how angry she’s getting, and how annoyed she is at Joe. I threw in her hitting me with her arm in the middle of the statement, partially because this is an autobiography and that’s what she did, but mostly because it is a really cool transition from exposition to dialogue.
The Revealing Character
My mother-in-law’s birthday and we are at a steak place. This is not just a steak place, this is a Steak Place. Dim lighting, comfortable seating, well-dressed serving staff, and even fancy menus, makes this one of the nicest places in town to buy a steak. The meal gets to us and after this perfect cut, perfectly grilled piece of meat is set in front of her, my mother-in-law says, “Can I get some 57 sauce?”
This woman is one of the most deceptive people I have ever known. For years I thought she was loving and supportive and wise. Turns out she’s more of a monster than most people I’ve ever met. And you have read enough of my autobiography to know that’s really saying something.
At the time, I was blind to all that. At the time of writing this lecture, I was blind to all that. Getting it ready for this presentation, I had to go back and edit it. Either way, this gorgeous piece of perfectly prepared meat is gently set before her on a delicate plate, and when she puts sauce on it, my blood goes cold. I turn my head away from her blasphemy as I hear my son beside me jokingly say, “I ain’t gonna use no 57 sauce.”
Then he laughs at me. He winks and says, “I bet you hated that.” He giggles. “You’re a writer. I bet you hated every bit of what I just said.”
My answer, “I loved and hated it. As a writer and a father.” He smiles. “So which loved which, did the writer hate it or the father?” I ask him.
“The writer hated it.”
“Wrong, the father hated it. The father wants his son to be eloquent, well-understood, and well-spoken. The writer loved it. Want to know why?”
For a writer fighting to reveal a character, there are many tools, exposition is the worst. Don’t tell me about what the character is like. Show me. Show me through action for sure, but don’t forget to illustrate your character through dialogue.
If a character says the line my son said, what do we know about them? We can say they have a low amount of education. We can tell a bit about the environment they were raised in. We can almost see the people who raised them. We can see how they are dressed, can see their level of hygiene.
Now as I write this, I am disgusted with myself. Making these assumptions about a person because of a slice of dialogue they spoke is appalling. When a person in life uses slang and improper grammar, when they use double negatives and the like, I do not jump to these conclusions. However, when I write, it is a different matter.
Revealing the character is a job that needs to be done as quickly as possible. It needs to be done with subtly and guile. The use of stereotypes is at times necessary. I would never use “Gonna,” “Ain’t,” or a double negative when writing a cultured, intelligent character.
Dialogue is a tool that can reveal a character better than almost anything. Look at Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. No matter how you dress her up, no matter the jewelry she wears or the parties she attends, there will always be a rough quality to her. You can’t clean up her history. You can’t change 20 plus years of background.
For myself, I was raised working class. My family cursed, drank, fought and worked. My background is rough and I am fiercely proud of it. I do not try to curb the person I was raised to be. I have learned to speak in ways and about things that are more suitable to the situation I am in, but in my heart I will always be a street kid from a gangland section of a big city.
When I speak, you can hear the ghost of that life in my words and my slang, in the things I talk about and the tone in which I speak about them. I curse loud. I laugh loud. My character is revealed in my dialogue.
It always will be.
The “Mrs. Galvin” chapter in the beginning, I’m getting off the bus and I’m talking to Grr. She’s the most popular girl in school, which makes her the most popular kid in school. She’s talking about how she runs everybody’s love life, and she did, almost. And from the things she says and how she says them and the words she chooses, her character is revealed. She likes Joe, she’s trying to get him under her thumb. She has this system she’s built for the perfect love life, and she’s proud of it. She is talking to Artist. He’s just rolling around in bliss at the idea that a girl wants to be with him, let alone Grr’s best friend. The second most popular girl, who is the prettiest. Not my rule, that’s the middle school girls’ rule. From just reading this section of dialogue, this conversation, you can tell so much about these two characters. Their character is totally revealed in their dialogue, and you want this.
You wanna be able to walk up to a piece of the dialogue you’ve written and just take the words and learn something about the character itself. This is a pretty common thing to start a story. You have dialogue come in and there’s just: dialogue is spoken, dialogue is spoken, dialogue is spoken. Then something sinister or out of place will be said, or something that’s off on grammar will be said, and you have learned something about that character based on the thing they said. This is one of the many tools you have for creating character and characterization, and it’s one of the most powerful.
Every tool you have to get across what your character is like and what your character wants, where your character is from, and what your character believes, every tool you can get should be used to the full extent. Dialogue is one of the most powerful.
—Prince
Jesse Teller 
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