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Found a simple trick to fix flat character dialogue
I swapped out all my characters' 'said' tags for action beats - like 'she tugged her sleeve' instead of 'she said nervously'. After one rewrite session, my 12 page scene finally had people talking like actual humans instead of robots. Has anyone else tried cutting dialogue tags entirely?
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victorcoleman1mo ago
she tugged her sleeve" - man that takes me back. I once spent a whole afternoon replacing every single dialogue tag with characters adjusting their glasses, lol.
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the_felix1mo ago
Wait, did you actually keep any of those glass-tugging lines?
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jake_hall881mo ago
Hated that trick until @victorcoleman showed me how much cleaner it reads, now I do it all the time.
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