…I’ve been coughing my lungs up for the last three days now and am sick and tired of it, and seriously weary, but THIS makes me want to sit up and start ragetyping.
(reaches down into drafts folder, rummages around to grab hold of the screed I wrote in, dear sweet Thoth on his ebike, January) and then decided not to post in the heat of the moment)
(oh, and prev tags, which were good)
#this screenshot punched me in the face#war flashbacks#my immortal#writing#don't be afraid to use 'said'#the brain just skips over filler words like that#it can't skip over whatever nonsense 'he whimpered ... I roared' is#also words convey specific things such as emotions and how loud someone is speaking and you can't just use them at random#don't just use a random word from a list of 'alternatives for said' you found online#use words intentionally
Right. (pauses to cough) Now then—
Something trundled by on my dash some days back. And I got all ready to write a post about it, and then Peter had his accident in the kitchen and it got jarred out of my head for days. Until now, in fact..
Anyway. The "something" was a beautifully made chart of "dialogue tags". Someone had gone to a lot of trouble over it, clearly with the intention of helping other people. And after I spent a while admiring the design (and the ingenuity of it), I nonetheless started having, yet again, the same set of annoyed and frustrated misgivings I get every time one of these substitutes-for-“said” or suggested-dialogue-tags lists crosses my path.
These lists aren’t a new phenomenon by any means. In the last century you could buy whole books of them. They were called "saidbooks", which is kind of ironic, since "said" was about the only word they didn't include. (Look, hello-delicious-tea over here knows about them too.) But their purpose was to provide people who were nervous about repeating themselves—and thought they'd be mistaken for bad writers when they did—with lots of other words to use.
(sigh) Plainly this misapprehension is still with us.
Am I about to get prescriptive? Depends on your definition of the term. (Though it's also true that in New York state, where I was licensed, properly trained nurses can prescribe. And in this paradigm, after nearly fifty years of doing this work, and various bestseller lists, blah blah blah, maybe I can be considered properly trained.) Anyway:
Using lists like this is not a good idea.
Your job as a writer is not to be concerned about whether you find the dialogue descriptors/attachments boring. Assuming you're writing something you intend to have other people read, the important question is: is your reader bored by them?
Because, ideally, they shouldn’t notice them at all.
The presence of constantly-changing descriptors, though, will inevitably distract your reader from the flow of your narrative and from the dialogue itself… which should be the very, very last thing you want to do.
The business of dialogue is to express as exactly as possible—and in the right tone and rhythm and with the best possible words—what the character thinks and feels at that moment.
The tone, phrasing and word choices of the dialogue itself should make plain how it’s being uttered—thereby (ideally...) rendering tags unnecessary. If it’s not doing so, the dialogue needs to be rewritten until it does. And if that sounds like it might be a lot of work...? Yeah, sometimes it is! But eventually it's what makes good writing stand out from the merely okay, or the "meh".
Now, sometimes the rhythm of handling the dialogue—in terms of how it connects to the lines before it and the lines that will come after—requires you to add a tag or similar qualifier to make things flow correctly. And this is what “said” is for.
"Said" is the invisible word. 98% of readers don't see it. (The remaining 2% are not who you need to be concerned about. No writing will ever please everybody. Don’t get yourself stuck trying.) And—rather magically—the more you use “said”, the less your reader will see it—assuming you're using it correctly, in ways framed to keep it from drawing attention to itself. "Said" stays out of the way while the message gets across. (I can't now recall which very senior writer said this to me once: "'Said' is a gentleman. It holds the door open for the line of dialogue to finish passing through the doorway of comprehension in the reader's head." …Antiquated imagery, but correct in essence.)
So back to my thesis: Using lists like this as a writing resource can hinder you in developing your own, inside-your-head resources, and (most importantly) your own unique voice, as part of the normal flow of acquiring words and style over time through reading and lived experience. …Come to think of it, one could make a case that saidbook lists are in their way a prehistoric version of ChatGPT: merely suggesting words that have sometimes worked in similar situations for other people, but won’t necessarily work correctly in yours. Picking “close-enough-for-jazz" words off a list and slotting them into an empty spot in your writing will gradually deprive you of a vital source of exercise for the writing muscles, and make you a less resourceful writer. You need to think consciously about your dialogue, and always be trying to make it work better. It’s an essential part of your job. And this part of your job is far more complex than can ever be solved by some list of hopeful verbs or adverbs.
Something else to warn you about, too: if you're heading (however casually) toward a career selling your writing, when your first editor sees your first manuscript, one of the first things you're going to hear out of them is "All these saidbookisms? They make your writing look lazy and sloppy and they’ll jar your reader out of the narrative flow. See if you can lose most of these." (And your first copyeditor is likely to get even more emphatic about it.) So save yourself some time and start learning better habits now.
And if you want to tell me "I don't care about getting published, I'm writing to please myself!", then... okay, fine! I’ve been there and know just how that is. But even way back then I’d go out of my way to at least try things that seemed likely to make me a better writer than I then was. (And mysteriously, I still do… because that’s work that won’t be over until I stop breathing.)
…Right. So—speaking of breathing—I will now get up, have a shower, get dressed, and go out into this pretty spring day to buy antihistamines and cough medicine. :/ …And then get back to the writing I’ve been working on… while letting “said” hold the door open for all those other words. 😏
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