[CT] Feltch, dialog style, bad movies of good books

[Daniel Moran]

At 05:11 PM 8/1/2002 -0500, Brad Daniels wrote:
>Anyway, as I read through the book, one key point of the dialog that you
>(DKM) didn't mention in your analysis of what made it good was the total
>absence of the word "said".  Indeed, there were pages of text without a
>single word outside of quotation marks, and yet I have yet to be even
>slightly confused as to who's speaking when.

Different writers approach this differently -- it's such a minor writing 
skill that most decent writers will have solved it in some fashion or 
other. There are a few exceptions to this -- one of Zelazny's (of all 
people) later Amber novels was so afraid of the word 'said' that I simply 
couldn't read it -- he stated, he concluded, he uttered, he proclaimed, 
almost every line -- people don't notice 'said' unless it's dreadfully 
overused; it's nearly an invisible word. But the avoidance of 'said' can 
lead to some really horrific writing.

If you can omit 'said' through positional text -- Trent blinked. "Yes?" -- 
you should. People can usually remember 4-5 lines in a row who's speaking 
even without attribution -- you can attribute once and then go for a bit 
without attributing again. More than that is dangerous -- every now and 
again I catch a writer (or the writer's typesetter) forgetting who's 
talking, and that's embarrassing -- you count back through the lines of 
unattributed text and realize that at some point one of the characters 
speaks twice in a row. A little bit of business helps set the place and 
give some sense of the people -- and helps avoid the use of 'said' in every 
sentence. (Also, the gag with alternating sentence is only useful when only 
two people are talking -- if there are more than two it won't do, unless 
for effect, say you want the speaker of a particular line to be unclear -- 
I'm not sure I've ever seen that used, but I suppose you could.)

But 'said' is safer than having your characters laugh or chuckle or howl or 
conclude or proclaim their dialog -- by a lot.

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