Caution: This post will not be about cake.
I’ll be back to cake soon enough (tomorrow’s the
summer solstice so I may bring back the Stonehenge cake and then there’s Sunday
when, for no reason at all, I plan to make an Orange Creamsicle cake or maybe a
cherry pie, we’ll see; it’s been an entire week without cake here), but today I
want to offer a writing tip or two of the nuts-and-bolts variety, which is to
say things like grammar, spelling, punctuation…
I know what you’re thinking…why? Well, because it matters.
I’ve been doing a great deal of editing lately and
am gearing up for much more. It’s going to be a busy summer, which is always
good news when one wants to continue eating (foodstuffs other than cake). But
it also means that I have been noticing the same kinds of common…well, let’s
not call them errors, let’s call them writing tics. Many of these can be
corrected with judicious copyediting (and I am here to tell you that everyone
needs a copyeditor—one can learn a great deal about oneself this way; for
example, that one relies too much on em dashes, commas, and parenthetical
statements), but some are a bit more subtle, which is to say they straddle the
line between form and style. In other words, it may not be technically wrong but
it just doesn’t read well. One of the most pernicious of these tics is dialogue
attribution. In other words, how you say someone says something. (Yes, I am
aware that this is a horrible sentence.)
My feeling is that many bad writing habits were
formed in school (I can’t tell you how long I quaked in fear every time I began
a sentence with a conjunction, ended one with a preposition, or split an
infinitive) and once they settle in, it really is difficult to shed them.
Notice I used “difficult” in the previous sentence, not “hard.” Why? Because I
had an English teacher long ago who was obsessed with my never using the word “hard”
when I meant “difficult.” Why? Who knows?
But it took decades for me to get over this mandate. We are also taught to try to make sentences interesting
by putting lots of vocabulary words in them and, for some reason still unknown
to me, to attribute dialogue with as many different verbs as possible.
Which is why we end up with sentences like this:
“I would rather not go to the movies,” she shared.
“That’s fine,” he exhorted, “we can stay home.”
“Okay,” she guffawed, “I appreciate that.”
What?
Please, no.
If there is one piece of advice I can give you—from the
standpoint of writer, editor, and especially reader, it is this: Just say “said.”
I know it feels weird, especially if you are using a
lot of dialogue in your writing (I also had a writing teacher tell me never to
use “a lot,” by the way and I’ll be honest, it hurt a little bit just now to
use it), to write “he said,” “she said,” over and over again, but it really is
the best way to go about attributing dialogue. The beauty of “said” is that it
just disappears after a while. Rather than getting stuck on how characters are saying things, the
reader will focus on what the
character is saying, which is what you want when you’re writing dialogue. If
you want to describe how a character is saying something, do it. But not with
the dialogue attribution. In between your lines of dialogue, mention that the
characters are getting angry or calming down or looking shifty or lowering
their voices or enunciating their words very carefully. This gives the reader a
much better insight into the character than trying to work out how s/he is
exhorting something. There are a few exceptions, of course. Sometimes
characters shout, sometimes they answer, and sometimes they ask. But mostly
they say things. And if they don’t, they should.
Right. Back to cake. And, next time perhaps,
fragments.
She said.
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