davel
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response 27 of 30:
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Feb 25 01:45 UTC 1994 |
As I promised a while back:
This is James Blish on the subject of what he called "said-bookism". The
context was a review of a story in a SF magazine; since the story is
deservedly forgotten, I'm going to cut references to the author's name.
I'm also quoting only Blish's comments relating to the defect under
consideration.
His dialogue is terrible. All the speakers sound alike, and all of
them sound like the narrative passages--that is, like Mr. ____
himself. The text betrays an obvious reason for this failure. Mr.
____ has concentrated upon how* a thing is said, to the exclusion of
*what* is said, which is exactly the wrong way to write dialogue. How
do we know he's done this? An informal count of his speech-tags
betrays it at once. About half of the 15,000 words of this story are
dialogue, at a minimum estimate, and in the 7,500 words of
miscellaneous yatter, the characters actually *say* something only
twenty-seven times. For the rest of the yarn, they shout (six times),
repeat, snap (twice), order (four times), stammer, observe (five
times), ask (sixteen times), lecture, argue, "half-whisper," muse,
call, sigh (four times), nod, agree (three times), report (three
times), cry, yell, command, bark, scream (twice), guess, state (twice,
both times "flatly"), add, suggest, chide, propose, announce, explain,
exclaim, admit, growl, chuckle (twice), sneer, answer, mutter (twice),
resume, gasp, bellow (twice), roar (twice), grunt, quote, fume, write
(twice), continue, and blare--a total of 89 more or less legitimate
substitutes for "said", not counting about an equal number of
illegitimate ones which we'll get to below.
Obviously, Mr. ____ has in his possession a table or book of such
substitutes, either compiled by himself or bought with good money, and
he is using it to give his dialogue "variety." There are many reasons
why this is a self-defeating project, of which three are important.
For one thing, it is over-emphatic. Mr. _____ has never met any group
of people who used so many different tones of voice in conversation,
and neither has anybody else. Such an assemblage of "said" substitutes
cannot fail to make the story in which it is used sound to the ear like
five minutes before feeding time in a bear pit. Secondly, it is
redundant. All sixteen of the speeches tagged by Mr. _____ with the
word "asked" end with question-marks; that is sufficient. When a
character repeats a word after another character, we do not need to be
told that "he repeated"; we can see that. When a character says "N-No,
sir," it is wasted ink to add, "he stammered."
Third, it inevitably leads even writers less tone-deaf than Mr.
_____ into morasses of approximation and bollixed construction. It is
only a short step from the dubious "he half-whispered" to a speech-tag
like "he tinned," which is meaningless unless it is soldering you are
writing about. (How, I wonder, did Mr. _____ manage to leave out that
favorite speech-tag of lady corn-huskers, "he husked?") Then you
abandon tags which represent sounds (although these are the only
legitimate reasons for using speech-tags other than "said"--it is
impossible, for instance, to suggest in the speech itself that the
character is whispering) and begin to substitute facial expressions
("he smiled," "he beamed," "he smirked," "he sneered"--what a
procession into hysteria!) or gestures ("he winced," "he shrugged").
Pretty soon you are turning nouns ("he understated") or adjectives ("he
flustered") into verbs, and your gestures have left the realm of
emotional expression altogether ("he pointed"). The final step in this
dismal process--and Mr. _____ takes them all, all the way out to the
end--is to start dropping entire sentences into the middle of your
speeches, sentences which have nothing at all to do with your
characters' manner of speaking, but instead only tell what *else* they
are doing while they are talking, and hence split their speeches in two
without taking any part in them. This results in a text which reads,
as Mr. _____'s frequently does, like a freshman translation from the
German.
Later in the same collection of reviews and discussions, Blish returned
to the subject in discussing a much better story. At this point he
quotes a bit (secondhand via James Thurber's _The Years With Ross_)
from another view:
I repeat, this is not an exclusive Atheling [Blish] prejudice,
though I was complaining about it in _Writer's Digest_ a good fifteen
years ago. Five years before that, unbeknownst to me, Wolcott Gibbs
was telling _New Yorker_ writers:
Word "said" is O.K. Efforts to avoid repetition by inserting
"grunted," "snorted," etc., are waste motion and offend the pure in
heart.
Similarly, Gibbs noted that
...writers always use too many adverbs. On one page I found 11
modifying the verb "said." "He said morosely, violently,
eloquently, so on." Editorial theory should probably be that a
writer who can't make his context indicate the way his character is
talking ought to be in another line of work. Anyway, it is
impossible for a character to go through all these emotional states
one after the other. Lon Chaney might be able to do it, but he is
dead.
Blish is certainly not always right, but usually worth reading; and IMNAAHO
he hit the bull's-eye on this one.
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