Yesterday, while bemoaning my lack of blog post topics to my walking buddy over our post-walk stop at the coffee shop (she gets coffee; I get tea), I had a revelation. (OK, not a big heavenly-choirs, life-changing sort of revelation, just a tiny hey-I-can-turn-that-into-a-blog-post revelation, but I’ll take what I can get.) She was listing suggestions for a topic, and it suddenly occurred to me that two of them were variations on the same problem.
The two problems that caught my attention were said-bookisms and character tags (aka epithets). Said-bookisms are all those substitutes for “said” that some writers use obsessively in their speech tags – he shouted, she demanded, he stated, she whispered, etc. Character tags are those little descriptive phrases that replace the character’s name when the writer needs to identify a character by more than a pronoun – “the brown-eyed man,” “the younger woman,” “the scarred man,” “the second undergraduate.” They can also be little bits of stage business, habits that the character has that supposedly distinguish him/her from other characters – popping his gum, fiddling with her cigarette, flipping his baseball hat, twirling her knitting needles.
Usually, these two techniques are treated separately in how-to-write advice, with said-bookisms being dealt with under dialog and character tags under either characters or narrative/description. But they’re both techniques for doing the same thing – labeling something (a line of dialog or a character) so that whatever is going on is clear – they’re both extremely useful when used correctly, and they’re both overused or misused all too often.
Part of the reason for the mis- and over-use, I think, is that it doesn’t occur to a lot of people that it is just as possible to overuse a technique as it is to overuse a specific word. It usually takes a little longer for the reader to notice and get irritated by an overused technique, but the aggravation factor tends to escalate rapidly after that. And once a reader is sensitized, she/he is likely to find even appropriate, innocuous dialog and character tags annoying, possibly to the point of giving up on the story.
Fixing the problem begins, as always, with diagnosis. If you can’t see it, you can’t fix it. And since these two problems are related, whenever you catch yourself doing one, it’s probably worth checking to see if you’re doing the other.
Once you realize what you’re doing, the first thing to do is consider why you did it. If the only reason for choosing a different word is that you are avoiding “said” or “George” or “she,” then delete the substitute and put back whatever you were avoiding, and see how it reads. If it still makes you twitchy, find an alternative technique – rephrasing for clarity, using stage business instead of a dialog tag, or whatever.
Sometimes, though, it’s important that a character mumbles or shouts or whispers or whatever. If it is, leave the tag and get as much variation as you can by changing where it goes in the line – there’s a very slight difference in how a given line will read, depending on whether “he mumbled” is at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the dialog.
And consider the paragraph that reads: “The captain stared out the window at his new spaceship, waiting for someone to speak. The tall, black-haired man shifted uncomfortably as the silence stretched. Finally, John said, “Looks better than I expected for a refurbished tanker.” The ex-navy man nodded once as if to emphasize the words.”
If that author was simply trying to avoid “he” or “John,” then this would be a lot clearer if all those character tags except the first were replaced with “he” (unless there really are four different people standing around and not just tall, black-haired, ex-navy Captain John). But if the author was trying to work in a bunch of description and background information without stopping to info-dump…well, it didn’t work very well here, but taking it all out is clearly not going to do the job.
So we’re back to rephrasing. “Tall, black-haired, ex-navy Captain John stared out the window…” would, I think, be somewhat better (and certainly less confusing) than the original paragraph, but it does rather overload the opening with adjectives. I’d prefer to start with the name – “Captain John stared out the window…” – and then fill in physical description either in one blunt, straightforward sentence – “He was a tall man with black hair and gray eyes, whose rigidly erect carriage proclaimed him ex-navy” – or by working it into stage business or internal dialog (“He ran his fingers nervously through his black hair as the silence stretched, wondering if they’d given him this piece of junk because he was ex-navy.”)
The thing about said-bookisms and character tags is that they’re relatively easy to do. It took me a lot less time to write the first example paragraph than it did to do the “fixed” versions of the sentences. This means that even experienced writers are likely to find things like this creeping into their first drafts, especially when they’re writing fast to get something down before it evaporates, and because they are actual techniques (and not just mistakes), they can’t just be automatically taken out in the rewrite. One has to consider them carefully and decide. It can be a right nuisance, but it’s worth the effort.
I find it’s easier to fix the said-bookisms in my own writing than the character tags. I pretty much use them to “cheat” – avoiding the info-dump without actually having to work at slipping in all the necessary information. Or at least, I do until someone like my sister reads it and bluntly tells me that she can’t figure out who is speaking half the time, and what the heck is wrong with using the character’s name once in a while?
Sisters are just about the most helpful editing tool ever.
I just had my critique group say the same thing about not knowing who is talking. Well, I guess I overdid it, again.
Nice post, Patricia.
The other thing about said-bookisms is that you don’t have to anything at all. Sometimes the way the paragraph flows alone is enough to identify the speaker.
And now I’m wondering if your walking partner frequents Fanficrants, because that’s one of their favorite topics of discussion.
Nice one. Quite a subtle point, yet important.
“Getting something down before it evaporates,” is a big part of it. For me, there’s also, “getting it down in a manner that isn’t actively painful to re-read” – because otherwise, the first draft loses story-nature and becomes a series of extended notes instead, which doesn’t work for me.
So I have to use the first quick-and-dirty techniques that come to hand, to get a tolerable tone and rhythm. “Rayon blah blah blah… Rayon blah…. Blah blah Rayon,” in close proximity is going to wear out my patience soon, in contexts where, “Rayon blah blah blah… The combat actuary blah… Blah blah the hamster-faced little android,” is less obtrusive on the first pass, so to speak. Similarly with said-bookisms and stage business.
I’d been doing this by instinct for a long time before I learned to read these, along with certain kinds of “John was…” infodump and “Jane thought/felt…” mental state dump, as a useful part of my construction style to be exploited, rather than a weak part of my writing style to be choked off at source. As you say, one has to get used to them as techniques rather than mistakes, to get the good out of them.
I also find that, on bad days when the prose is flowing like stodgy porridge, it helps to remind myself of this point quite sharply.
Louise – Character tags are ONE technique for avoiding infodumps, but they’re not the ONLY technique – and infodumps themselves are a useful technique. The trick is not to use any one technique exclusively (or completely forbid any one technique), but to use the right mix for the particular story (and recognize that the mix will change from story to story).
Jean Ann – Thank you.
Deborah – I think the character-tags and said-bookisms thing is just a pet peeve for my walking buddy, but I don’t know for absolute sure. I’ll have to ask if she reads Fanficrants.
Gray – What distinguishes a first draft from extended notes is, I think, something that varies writer to writer. “Painful to reread” is not part of the equation for me, personally; the distinction for me is more about voice and depth of detail. Or to put it another way, when I’m doing a compressed first draft, it sounds enough like actual part-of-the-story narrative summary that I can use large chunks of it nearly verbatim for transition sections; when what I have is extensive notes, I can’t use even a sentence directly. The voice and style is wrong, and the content changes too much when it’s notes. When it’s a draft, chunks of it may expand a lot, but they don’t change radically. It’s enormously easier for me to write from a compressed draft than from notes; unfortunately, writing the compressed draft is something I find exceedingly difficult. You win some, you lose some…
Thanks for the reminder. I’m not so bad with the tags, but giving the characters other “names” is a bad habit of mine.
Thanks so much for this post! I have been having a problem with character tags- I just didn’t know what to call them. My MC is royalty, so I’ll either refer to her by her name or “the princess”. The thing is, she’s escaping from the throne’s usurper OUT OF THE KINGDOM. And she’s GOING UNDERCOVER. So it doesn’t make any sense to call her “the princess” anymore. I’ve been experimenting with “the girl” but it doesn’t quite fit. Now I know exactly what to do! (Yay for adjectives!)
Alex – Well, you can always take them out in revision, if you have to. Sometimes, as Gray said, tags can be a necessary part of getting the first draft down. Like scaffolding – something that’s there so you can get everything put together properly, but that you’ll take down once the project is finished.
Mary – Depending on where you want to go with the story, “the princess” might still be a perfectly appropriate tag, reminding your readers that your MC is, after all, still a princess even if she is currently on the run. If you’re not planning to have her go back to defeat the usurper any time soon, though, it would make sense to switch to something else when you can’t manage with the simple pronoun “she.” 🙂