Writing It Right: On When to Say Said
by Carolynn Carey
This article is a follow-up to the article entitled “Killing the —lys Kindly,” which discussed the need to watch our writing for the lazy use of –ly adverbs in dialogue attributions. Again I refer the reader to the book entitled Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print by Renni Browne and Dave King, and I wholeheartedly applaud their admonition to almost always use the word “said” as your speaker attribution.
“What?” you scream. “Surely not always,” you snigger mockingly. “You don’t really mean always, do you?” you demand hotly.
Yes. Well, almost always. (And delete those adverbs please.)
“Ridiculous!” you snort. “I’ve seen Big Name Writer X use lots of attributions other than said and she’s on the NYT best seller list.”
True. But that doesn’t mean that you can get by with having your characters grimace dialogue, smile dialogue, chuckle dialogue, snap dialogue, or growl dialogue. To do so brands you an amateur or a lazy writer, at least in some people’s eyes.
As Browne and King admonish, “Don’t use speaker attributions as a way of slipping in explanations of your dialogue…As with all other types of explanations, either they’re unnecessary (‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized) or they are necessary but shouldn’t be (‘Do you consider that amusing?’ she whined.)”
Browne and King continue: “What this amounts to is your using the verb 'said' almost without exception.” They also explain that the reason those other verbs (such as “demand” or “offer” or “growl”) don’t work is because they “draw attention away from the dialogue. They jump out at the reader, make the reader aware, if only for a second, of the mechanics of writing. They draw attention to your technique, and a technique that distracts the reader is never a good idea. You want your readers to pay attention to your dialogue, not the means by which you get it to them.”
The word “said,” they write, “isn’t even read the way other verbs are read. It is, and should be, an almost purely mechanical device—more like a punctuation mark than a verb. It’s absolutely transparent, and so is graceful and elegant.”
Of course there’s another side to this argument. Not long ago I read a writer’s blog on which the writer pointed out that few readers will notice tags that have characters growling or laughing or sobbing dialogue and that those readers who do notice won’t care. Perhaps this is true, but is that a good enough excuse for taking the lazy way out? Recently I read a book by a popular writer in which the hero and heroine frequently snapped their dialogue. Often I had no idea the character was irritated until the author wrote, “he snapped” or “she snapped” as an attribution. After a certain point, I became irritated myself, feeling that the author was using that tag instead of making it clear through the dialogue or accompanying action that the characters were irritated.
But in the end, it’s each writer’s decision as to when to say said.
Copyright © Carolynn Carey.
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