Said's dead, baby, said's dead

And Goddamn, Neil always says this stuff so well. Here's his advice on 'said's and adverbs. Good tips. Hi Neil! Like so many others, I'm an aspiring author who wants to ask your advice on some detail of the craft. This particular questionable detail is about adverbs and dialogue. "Said's" are invisible. They vanish onto the page. The eye barely sees them -- they become one with the inverted commas that indicate that something is being said. They're the arrows on the speech balloons that show you who's saying what. Lots of authors, when they start out, remember from school that you shouldn't repeat words too much, and are careful to replace each "said" with "growled" "uttered" "yelped' "hissed" "exclaimed" "asseverated" "muttered" "affirmed" and so on, and cannot work out why people dismiss the writing as amateurish. Use them, but use them sparingly. It's like salt in a dish. Too much and it's all you taste. I don't think there's anything wrong with adverbs (he asseverated, gnomishly) but I do tend to do a final read-through of anything I've written, deciding whether each adverb lives or dies, based really on whether it adds anything. If it's implicit in what I've already said in the book I chuck it out, (bravely) .

<> Ah, emily, it was a school project, rather than a creative writing course, so I imagine it could have just been an experimental thing, rather than saying 'said is dead'. I mean, 'said' is one of the best words ever and very useful if you're going to have a character saying things. There are some words that make me want to punch something when I read them, 'growled' being the best of 'em (unless the character growling is actually a bear, and even then I'd be more interested if it 'said' something, rather than growled). I tend to find that when I read stuff full of adverbs it reminds me of school projects. The above post said it all really, so I don't see what I actually added anything. (I was concerned when I saw the thread because I thought some MA was advocating the death of 'said' and this would be a terrible indictment on the course I did. As an aside, they did not once 'teach' me anything on that course, they just gave me time to write and redraft, which was the reason I went on it in the first place.)

I actually thought you meant Edward Said... I need to get a non academic life and soon.

That's an interesting idea - I wonder if you could write a surreal story with a male character called She Said, to confuse people. "Interesting," said She Said. "I didn't hear, what was that she said?" She Said said...

Oh, please...

Wasn't that on the Revolver album?

"any piece that avoids 'said' as the verb of choice other than very, very, very, very, very, very, very sparingly is only going to move from the slush pile to the bin." Yes, this seems to one of many examples of teachers actively teaching children to write badly. I used to edit a magazine written by and for young people in north London and one of my biggest problems was getting them to unlearn the practice of peppering their articles with ridiculous, meaningless phrases like: "it could be argued." It addition to saving 'said', I demand a war on pointless equivocation.

here here, (although how I'd have ever passed my A levels without the 'It could be said,' gem I really don't know).

My personal favorite: "All that said and done."

This is utter nonsense. i thought it would be about Edward Said as well. Nevermind.

If your dialogue is good, do you realy need to use said or an adverb? Why not just say nothing. If the words are in speech marks, then clearly they 'said' it. Personally I avoid both, but then again, there are times that I feel that I'm writing a play rather than prose.

That's okay if your dialogue is always between two characters who take turns in speech, but if there are a few people in a scene, an occasional said is quite helpful.

True Andrew, but I deftly engineer scenes to only include two people talking at a time! I guess one day I'll have to find a device for introducing a third or fourth.

"Actually I think "said" is over-rated as a description of talking. What about expostulated, ejaculated, growled, snarled, murmured, demurred, argued, harangued, whispered, shouted, or expounded? All infinitely more descriptive." Yes, but there's a difference between something being more descriptive and being an accurate description of what's going on. I can't imagine any instance where I'd use 'expostulated' but all the others are absolutely fine in specific contexts, where the character really is demurring, snarling or whispering and the fact that they're doing so has some clear relevance to the story. But for the most part, if you're writing a conversation then what's being said should be far more important than and should provide most of the necessary clues towards the way it's being said. If you overuse words liked harangued, demurred, expounded, you're saying 'look at me, I'm writing'. That doesn't matter so much in short comic pieces but once you've put up with more than 200 words of it, it's a real pain in the arse and if the writer's trying to write something even vaguely serious, it's a one-way ticket to complete failure - there's just no room in a story for anything dark or painful to happen if there's loads of haranguing and expounding going on.