Got told all my dialogue tags were jarring and now I scrap half of them

A beta reader in a discord group said my characters "kept jerking glances" and "suddenly whipping around" so much it took her out of the story. I went back and counted 14 instances in a 10 page chapter. Cut it down to 3. Has anyone else had to kill their favorite dramatic action beats?

2 comments

2 Comments

gavin92815d ago

Honestly, I feel like the first draft of every story I write is just characters dramatically reacting to things happening around them. Ngl, I had to call a ceasefire on all the "narrator sighed heavily" and "protagonist let out a breath they didn't know they were holding" moments. Caught myself using "eyes widened" like it was going out of style in a single chapter. It's brutal when you have to cut those beats because they felt so epic when you wrote them. Tbh, three times is a pretty good kill count, that's like winning against your own bad habits.

kai_stone9915d ago

Caught myself doing the same thing with "she felt a chill run down her spine" about fourteen times in one story. What finally helped me was reading the draft out loud in a flat, boring voice - it made all those dramatic reactions sound ridiculous, so I cut half of them right there. Another trick that worked was setting a rule for myself: only one physical reaction per scene, and it had to actually move the story forward instead of just telling the reader the character is feeling something.