I was listening to John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades on Audible, and as usual I was struck by his overuse of the he said / she said pattern:
We have to go in through the front gate, Kevin said.
But we’ll get killed!, Mary exclaimed.
Oh, I’ve got an idea, Kevin said.
(Not an actual quote.) Scalzi later wrote a direct-to-audio novella and recognised it as a problem for audio.
My question is, why aren’t dialogs in books written as in stageplays or screenplays?
KEVIN - We have to go through the front gate.
MARY - But we’ll get killed!
KEVIN - Oh, I’ve got an idea…
Sure, it looks a bit contrived, but so does the other form. And at least it would spare authors the drudgery of trying to come up with yet another alternative to the verb to say.
I’ve written a couple books, and would never write in screenplay form, because that’s awful. It takes the reader straight out of the scene.
When writing fiction, the goal (as I understand it) is to tell an immersive story, by painting a picture of the events occurring, by describing them. This includes the fact that when a character says something, you describe that happening. Possibly with a “he said/she said”, possibly by describing the tone and emotion, possibly by just slapping in quotation marks and hoping that context clues convey who is saying what. (I had a character who spoke in a different font, because he was writing; that was super helpful.) Regardless of what method you use, the goal is the same: to tell your story while maintaining reader interest and immersion.
Of course, I’m biased - I’m not entirely sold on the idea that the word “said” is the devil - and I’m also not entirely sold on the idea that mixing things up with “whispered”, “shouted”, “exclaimed”, “snapped”, “growled”, “muttered”, “swore”, “deadpanned”, and other such descriptive terms are florid. I just use what seems right for the situation, and if anybody doesn’t like it they don’t have to read my book. It can also help to mix up where you put the descriptor, begbert2 said, concluding his post.
How is that supposed to work if you’re reading aloud? Would you say the words “MARY” and “KEVIN”?
On the other hand, if you’re reading aloud, the eye can easily skim over all the "said"s so that they’re not intrusive. The normal convention for writing dialogue works fine, if the author handles it skillfully enough.
If you’re reading to yourself, the mind automatically edits or at least smooths the dialog tags out, and they’re not intrusive. Listening to someone reading aloud, the mind does not do that and stacked tags can get repetitive.
Odd that Scalzi’s been mentioned. He relied on the smoothing effect when he wrote his early novels and when they were made into audio books he was appalled at the way the dialog sounded. He’s changed his writing since then.
I guess the person reading aloud could start each dialogue saying KEVIN and MARY in a narrator’s tone, then choose when it’s necessary to indicate who’s talking, and/or rely on using different voices for each character. It’s what most people would do when reading a screenplay aloud.
Sure, it works fine most of the time because we’re used to it. But it’s only a convention, that arose at some point in (Western?) history. Changing a regular novel to a screenplay format would look weird and unnatural, just as a novel printed in Helvetica would look weird and unnatural. However, it’s easy to imagine a society in which this is the way novels are written, and it wouldn’t be profoundly different from our society.
I mentioned him precisely because of this. I used John Scalzi because the novels of his that I’ve consumed on Audible pretty much all had that problem. I remember one novel ending on something witty being said by a character, and the last two words the voice actor spoke (in a triumphant, end-of-story way) were… “John said”. It was a bit sad really, but what’s a voice actor to do? The words were there on the page, he had to speak them.
As you say, and as mentioned in the article linked in the OP, Scalzi himself was appalled at how it sounded in audio, and has changed his writing in recent years to account for this.
If a conversation is a dialogue there is no need to stick the “he said” in every single paragraph; in multi-people conversations, different speech patterns can help get rid of some of those blurbs.
The general feeling is that using a consistent “he said” “she said” allow the phrase to become more or less transparent. “Coming up with alternatives” is a sign of *a bad writer *and has became a joke.
I’m a writer who has audiobooks done of my stuff, and I’ve run into this problem. When I read over my books in print form, the “saids” all kind of disappear, but they stand out like sore thumbs in the audiobook. I’ve actually taken to going through my books and stripping out some of the dialog tags before I send them to my narrator. Before that, I asked him if he notices them (he does a lot of narration for many different authors) and he says no, I’m just hypersensitive to it–but I still make adjustments now.
(I think what really makes them annoying in audio form is that a good narrator does different voices for each character, so it’s obvious who’s talking even with minimal tagging. You can’t get away with that in a book, especially if you have more than two people in a scene.)
I’ve always enjoyed listening to audio books when performing activities that allow it. Although I tend to ignore the verb ‘say’ when storytelling turns to dialogue mode it sometimes bothers me, which may be a sign of overuse, of the author’s failing to offer additional or nuanced information on how a conlocutor speaks. There are also times when the blunt overuse seems to be an intentional one, where the author refrains from directly revealing such details on purpose. But saying you cannot enjoy a story due to the repetition of the verb ‘say’ is like deciding not to purchase a house because the kitchen cabinets are a different hue from the one you really like. Seriously?
Raymond Carver used to overuse it, using it after every time he wrote dialog, even when it was just two people talking. But that was a stylistic choice.
Usually, it’s unobtrusive to use “said” in place of synonyms, though there are ways of indicating the speaker without it.