Writers: Why oh why in the world are fiction editors and/or publishers so stuck on the god-given fact that 99% of all dialog must be offset with “said”, or nothing at all? Yet! These hypocrits advise writers to remove adverbs by using stronger verbs! Oh yeah, said…repeated a million times…that’s strong all right! :rolleyes:
Can someone on the SD explain what the thinking is? I mean, stronger words than he said, she said add color, even exaggeration, in a concise manner. It’s an efficient use of words, for goodness sake! An editor should like that!
“He said/she said” serves a necessary and unobtrusive purpose within a dialogue. It conveys a minimum of necessary information without being distracting or calling attention to itself. Quite often, if the dialogue consists of only two people, even the “saids” can be dropped once the participants in the dialogue have been established. Mood and color should be established as much as possible by the content of the dialogue itself, not by adverbs.
Too many adverbs are distracting and look amateurish. Too many adjectives are the same way. Good prose is about evoking images and impressions in the reader, not painting them every little picture.
Are there some simple excercises that teach how to master this tool of the trade? Any rec’d links or texts? Or, outside of a writing course, is a critical look at one’s favorite authors the best way to observe this in action?
“Said” is not weak. Rather it is invisible to most readers. It allows clarity without calling attention to itself. “Asked” when paired with a question mark serves the same function.
Few other terms do this. Stronger terms do the opposite. They move the focus from the dialog to the intrusive author telling the reader how to hear the dialog. There are certain times when this is necessary, as with sarcasm. Even so, “She sarcasted” is impossible; “she said sarcastically” is better. Most words can be appended as adverbs to the basic said without disruption. “Her tone was sarcastic” moves the commentary into a new sentence rather than as an appendage to the line of dialog, which is often superior.
Most strong words devolve into camp rather quickly. He snorted. He stuttered, He shouted. He ejaculated. He blustered. He vomited. He wheezed. Colorful, perhaps, but fatal to any sense of the speaker’s style because the tags overwhelm the mood and feeling that should be generated solely by the words.
Any rule can be broken if you understand the rule and understand the exceptions. But the short answer to your question is that you want the apparatus of the story to be as invisible as possible, discretely hidden behind walls as pipes are in houses. The Pompidou Center can get away with putting the pipes on the outside. Few other buildings can.
Unless you are writing a Pompidou Center of a story, do what every architect does. Make the structural components as invisible as possible and make the story elements themselves strong.
But, Exapno…don’t you think “Her tone was sarcastic” sounds like mechanical, stage direction AND is more obtrusive than “she said, sarcastically”? The latter seems to flow, in my mind. Yet, the latter uses a taboo adverb.
…Perhaps a balanced mix of the two styles is best?
As for stronger verbs, I can accept that many times they are superfluous to the action in the dialog; hence, an insult to the reader’s intellegence.
I dunno… My approach is to keep my narrator as quiet as possible. All that direction seems unnecessary, IMHO. Consider this small example:
(a) “Who stole my cookies?” She huffed.
vs.
(b) “Who stole my cookies?” She asked, emphatically.
Isn’t (a) very direct? Words like: huffed, snapped, barked, chortled, joshed, bossed…to me, they succinctly define the emotion or capture the human response in one simple word. By using such succinct verbs, it completes the picture, IMHO…vs. becoming wordy.
While I’ll continue to check back here, I’ll also have to find a local writer’s group and pose these questions to them…or have them work through some exercises with me. They’re meetings are few and far between, however.
You don’t have to remove all adverbs from your arsenal. One shouldn’t rely on them, and perhaps it’s best for beginners to go cold turkey – especially if one is addicted and finds oneself sprinkling 'em into dialogue with frenetic abandon. But a well-chosen adverb is certainly acceptable. The trick is to write dialogue that’s picturesque and clear enough to do the job without needing extraneous explanation.
As far as the attribution “said” goes, I’ll repeat that it’s largely invisible to the reader. Beginning writers don’t believe that. I’ve read stories where, on a single page, the writer was in such dread terror of repeating the word “said” that s/he avoided them by using every substitute in the dictionary: responded, shouted, averred, opined, retorted, asserted, insisted, laughed, cried, etc. Nothing is more obtrusive than that! “Said” slips invisibly into the reader’s mind.
And as GuanoLad says, many times you don’t need any attribution at all. Sometimes for fun I’ll write entire scenes without a single attribution, and the readers never notice because the characters’ actions and dialogue are clear enough to understand who’s saying what, and how. That’s a great exercise for dialogue writers, in fact.
Edited to add: While we’re at it, Jinx: if you’re gonna include “she said” or even “she huffed” after the quote, you should use a comma; also, don’t capitalize the word after the quotation mark.
Previous posters have beat me to the way “said” is invisible, in a way, to the reader. And said it much better, but here’s my take…
I read a mystery–I think it was A Touch of Frost, but don’t count on it–where the dialogue tags were very rarely “said”, and mostly all: he hissed, he snorted, he sneered, he chuckled, she smirked, he swore, she shouted, he pouted, she simpered, he growled.
I found it really annoying and started counting them, then stopped reading the book altogether. “Saids” would have disappeared for me, and left me paying attention to the words that the characters were speaking.
Sure does! Our shock culture society would eat this up! The unwashed masses would love it! Rats! :smack: Only one flaw with my theory, though… They don’t read, now do they?
Note how the sarcasm was conveyed without any description of how he said the words.
Writers convey the tone of a sentence by choosing the correct words and stress. If you have to use an adjective or phrase to describe how something is said, you’re doing it wrong. In addition, the reader won’t get the tone until after the words are said and he has formed an opinion.
The importance of using a speech tag is to avoid confusion. In a dialog, it’s often hard for the reader to keep track of who’s saying what. There are methods to help, but they aren’t always appropriate, so without speech tags, the reader has to go back and count the speeches in order to get things straight (Jasper fforde had fun with this in one of his Thursday Next novels).
The only time I ever found “he said” noticeable was when reading Raymond Carver aloud, but Carver was going for an effect, and the use created a particular mood.
As a good general rule, the reader should know the tone of the speaker’s voice without having to be told what the tone is. The speech tag is only to keep straight who was speaking.
Stephen King covers this issue in the second half of “On Writing.” The first half is autobiographical, the second half is how to write, and the epilogue covers the van accident.
This book is one of the best he ever wrote, and one of the few I would recommend to anyone, even non-King people. It is superb!
