: Re: Action/dialogue tags: What's the right amount? Someone who reviewed my novel said that he "wanted to see more facial features/expressions and body language". So I figured I wasn't using enough

@Gloria285

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I'm sorry but "wanted to see more facial features/expressions and body language" seems more like an exercise in pedantry than actually constructive criticism intended to help you. Having run the gauntlet of MFA workshops, I can't help reading the comment as "I know about body language and you ... don't." I grew up with modernist minimalism: you know, you've heard the old Hemingway quote from Death in the Afternoon:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may
omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing
truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as
though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an
ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer
who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow
places in his writing.

[I'm surprised to find that Wikipedia actually has an entry on this, which it calls the Iceberg Theory, q.v., or the Theory of Omission. Hemingway and, quite independently, T.S. Eliot referred to it as the Objective Corelative.]

As such, I was trained to do everything possible to get the reader into the moment, and sometimes that means providing a great deal of details, but ultimately we want to reach the point where much of the literary experience is provided by the reader's imagination.

So to return to your question, How many action/dialogue tags should I add in a scene? I'd say, As few as possible.

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