Said, Said, Said

A lot of novelists will tell you that you can use 'said' in every narrative tagline.

First of all, not everything is 'said'--sometimes you exclaim, and sometimes you ask or question. sometimes you scream or whisper. So, at the very least, you need to line up your tag with your ending punctuation (.!?).

Second, tags are not always about who said what... sometimes they are about expressing body language or how a thing was spoken. It can be about the pulsating vein in a person's neck or the darkness that crossed their brow.

The days of 'said, said, said' as the only necessary tag are numbered. I think most authors would agree with me, that using said in every instance is actually grammatically incorrect, and can even make the reader uncomfortable.

I hope you enjoyed the blog and got something out of it. #novel #novels #writer #writingtips #writingadvice #author #authors #novelist #said #backwardswritingadvice