Quote:
Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel
so when you say "dialog tags" you mean like "exclaimed", "cried", "shouted", "murmured"... ? if editors really *are* encouraging writers to use "said" in place of ALL these tags (and countless others i have not listed) i think that is pretty lamentable !! why actively encourage the impoverishment of the language ?? "exclaimed" does not mean the same as "said" *or* as "murmured" and it conveys a completely different tone. i don't say you can't or shouldn't complement these "tags" by action, as "slamming the book down" is very expressive ; but people's vocabularies are tending to shrink progressively already, why hasten this ? english is a rich and varied language, i would think it is in the publisher's best interest (and everyone else's) to encourage writers to take advantage of this.
i can remember reading a story written by a friend of mine (non professional) : at every line, he said the character "reached" somewhere / something (parvenir). when i pointed out that he used the word "reached" a lot (too much...), he argued that it was to avoid using the word "got" too much, and vary the language. but ironically he ended up doing exactly what he wanted to avoid, with a different word. i think the more different ways a writer knows how to express something, the better... it makes for more nuanced and precise writing.
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I hope you'll bear with me as I veer.
Writing fiction well is a balancing act. The writer has to write both well and unobtrusively, because the reader cannot get lost in the story if they are marveling about how well it's written.
Isaac Asimov, a champion of what's called the transparent style, used to rewrite any sentence that he wrote that struck him as really exceptionally good. His point was he wanted the reader focused on what he was saying, not how he was saying it.
The advantage of 'said' over any other dialog tag is that it's the most transparent. It's unobtrusive and the eye just slides over it. This is not true of other tags. I looked at a random sampling of a chapter in the middle of one of the books in question and saw half a dozen examples of 'replied' used in succession. Most of those sentences should have been rewritten with either said or perhaps no dialog tag at all. It actually has to do with the same issue you had with reached in your friend's story. Because many novels have so much speech, dialog tags have to be re-used, and because the other ones do stand out more it can often lead to signs of over-use.
Using any tag except 'said' because it's seen as boring is normally a sign of an amateur rather than a professional. The best approach is usually considered to be to use other tags in moderation so as not to either over-use them or dilute their impact.
Said shouldn't be the only tag, but it should be the most common one.