grosgrognon:

sophiahelix:

roane72:

electricalhappenings:

highfunctioning-homosapien:

everythingwillberevealed:

timetobeadventurous:

rainbowsaola:

specsonspecs:

Why didn’t anyone make this sooner? I hate when people only use the word “said” in stories.

THANK YOU

BLESS YOUR COW

BLESS THIS POST.

CAN I MARRY A POST?

PRAISE THY HOLY POST AND ALL TERRIBLE FANFICTION THOU HATH CURED

Um. NO. Do we need to go into the discussion that ‘said’ is an invisible word and vastly preferable to using a thousand different adjectives? Use ‘said’ like, I dunno, 90-95% of the time. It’ll make the times you don’t actually mean something.

(And I’m gonna be really bitchy and point out that it’s actually ‘thou hast’, not ‘thou hath’.)

I will punch anyone who uses the word “contested” in a story instead of said.

I am fairly laidback about a lot of so-called rules, both as a reader and a writer. For instance, I love a good adverb, and love it madly.

But dialogue verbs other than said = TERRIBLE NO GOOD AWFUL REPULSIVE THINGS THAT RUIN OTHERWISE DECENT PROSE.

for the love of Troll Jegus, read anyone - Alice Munro, Colson Whitehead, Raymond Carver - and admire the beauty of a simple, direct said

OK, so my personal reading preferences + most popular lore dictates that said-bookisms, like adverbs and exclamation marks and all the other really fun bits of writing, are awesome, but only when used sparingly so that they actually stand out and mean something, as someone above put it, rather than cluttering everything up and getting in the way of the actual dialogue. And that is definitely the advice I would give/have given whenever it comes up.

But. The OP literally says “I hate when people only use the word ‘said’ in stories.” That’s not actually something you can be objectively wrong about! You like what you like. So, “No!” she contested = The right choice for some readers!

Well, I find it interesting, anyway. And I wonder to what extent we’re socialised to find the well-known writing faux pas more clunky than they actually are. Everything about narrative construction is artificial, after all.

(Source: imgfave)