Thoughts About Dialogue Tags

A cousin of mine recently, in an email exchange about writing, asserted "Remember: no adverbs in the retort. ‘Said,’ is good enough." To which I replied, "That's overdoing it. Nothing wrong with 'replied gleefully' now and then.

I was reminded of this when I happened to read the blog post What Your Choice of Dialogue Tags Says About You, by Christopher Hoffmann. Hoffmann tends in my cousin's direction, but with nuances, some of which are very entertainingly presented. First he points out that in our daily speech, we normally say that someone "said" something, not that they "remarked" or "answered" or "hollered" or whatnot. He also notes that people of a certain age use "like" for "said," as in "I'm like, 'Wow, you really mean that?'" Personally, I never interpreted this to mean that the person actually said whatever it was, but rather that that was how they felt about it, but I could be wrong about that. (Incidentally, I can assure Hoffmann that people born before 1970 have spoken in this manner, because it was common parlance when I was in college, back in prehistoric times.)

Hoffmann then tells us that people who want their writing to be considered literary scorn the use of anything more colorful than "said" because, as so many books on writing prescribe, one must "show, not tell." If you have to say that someone ranted, evidently you haven't made the actual speech rant-y (rantish?) enough for the reader to discern that the person was ranting rather than stating, musing, joking, or remarking superciliously. Well, I'll confess that in my youth (that is, around the age of twelve) I believed this hoopla about "show, don't tell" and it was deleterious to my writing because I assumed you had to show everything and tell nothing, which made for masses of laborious dreck. Fortunately I could not bear to keep up the effort to show and not tell, and in truth, the very best fiction is full of telling as well as showing. And, as Hoffmann admits later on, sometimes you really need to tell the reader that the character is ranting rather than merely blabbing on endlessly in a mild sort of way. But he suggests that it is only in commercial and genre fiction that one can get away with deviating from "said."

I agree with Hoffmann that it is generally preferable to use more colorful dialogue tags as spice, but I am curious whether the literary writing to which he makes reference is the stripped-down bare-bones Raymond Carver style that was so popular in the '80s, or if this is still prescribed in the MFA programs of today. While I do read recent literary fiction, the fact that I don't teach fiction writing frees me from feeling obliged to keep up with all the latest trends, just as the fact that I specialize in Czech modernism rather than American contemporary art frees me from being obsessively au courant about the New York gallery scene.