Hot Topics: The Said Debate

This one is an interesting topic, in that unlike many of my other Hot Topics it doesn’t have to do with the basic fundamentals of story telling, but rather writing stories. It has to do with tags. I don’t mean tags like twitter, I mean dialogue tags, words likes said, whispered, yelled etc. The problem happens when a writer doesn’t know how to use them or understand how they come across to the reader.

The problem starts at a young age. A well-meaning teacher (or even that well meaning writer friend) tells you not to use the same word over and over again, especial and including the word said. It’s boring they say, repetitive. So you rack your brain for a word you can use instead. That's when you pull out words like murmured, shouted, whispered, cried, thundered etc.

And all that would be true except for one thing- the reader doesn’t read the word said, it’s like leaving a question blank on the SAT, it’s completely neutral. They skim over it. But unfortunately that teacher or writer friend has screwed you over to two fold. That would be because of what you replaced said with. Those “fancy” tags have a name, editors call them ‘Said Bookisms.’ That’s because it’s the literary equivalent of acting in Spanish Soap Operas. No one speaks like that in real life. People rarely yell, much less thunder. These words call attention to themselves, especially the more creative ones, and that generally is bad as it interrupts flow and reader concentration. The only things most of those words are missing are big hair and mustaches.

So how can we fix our mistakes? Well I going to take one line of dialogue and show you what can go wrong with it and then what can go right.

“But Julie,” Mark said. “I don’t want to leave you.”

This is a no frills dialogue here. You know who said it and what was said. With this example the context must tell the reader how it was being said and why. There’s nothing wrong with this at all and is a perfectly acceptable piece of writing, if unremarkable. But because you decided this is boring, in the next couple posts I’m going to change it up a bit.

*** Note: This is likely the most technical/grammatical I'll ever get with writing as a written language in this blog. So breath a sigh of relief if you were worried about it. If you were sad, I would tell you I'm sorry, but I'm not.