Daily Archives: February 11, 2008

He said, “said.”

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Every once in a while you see advice for writers to lay off using the word “said” so much. When you read work by people who take this advice seriously, it shows. Characters who “exclaim” and “counter” and “blurt” when really all they’re doing is saying something is the mark of a writer who has forgotten their own experience reading. “The masters don’t use ‘said’ all the time,” I have heard people say.

Yes, they do. All the time. You just don’t see it. Good writers use those alternatives the way that quiet people use profanity. They are words for when you want to be noticed.

When I write (notice how by inference I am defining myself as a good writer — pretty sly, huh?), I use ‘said’ to resolve ambiguity about the speaker and to provide phrasing clues, to put in a narrative pause where the speaker is taking a breath. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that ‘said’ is not a word, but punctuation. I postulate here that in the cognition of written language, that ‘said’ is managed by some sort of pre-processor, an arrow pointing to the character speaking, and by the time the text reaches the active story-enjoyment centers of the brain, the word is gone, in its place is an understanding of the voice of the speaker. The times I most notice ‘said’ is when it’s missing and I’ve lost track of who is speaking.

Still, I often find myself using a similar crutch. I will supply business to change the reader’s focus to the correct speaker:

Beth fiddled with her glasses. “That’s weird.”
Joe nodded. “Yeah.
Ed picked his nose. “You guys are just paranoid.”

Business can be useful, if it enhances characterization. If it’s just to replace “said”, it’s just a bad as

“That’s weird,” Beth mumbled.
“Yeah,” Joe agreed.
“You guys are just paranoid,” Ed whined.

A special subset of the ‘don’t use said’ crowd is the ‘never use the same word for a verbal utterance twice’ bunch. This can lead to some truly comic writing. (In fact, that gives me an idea… stay tuned. You and we and all of us, we have a project.) Generally I use the “business trick” when I want to name the reader before the spoken words, which can be helpful. For some reason I resist the form “Beth said, ‘That’s weird.'” and so forth. Part of my prejudice I’ll defend on timing grounds; I generally use the device when I want to slow the pace of the conversation. Still, there’s a limit, so the advice here about the invisibility of ‘said’ is directed toward myself as much as toward anyone else.

Meanwhile, what a great sentence: “‘Yeah,’ Joe agreed.” As if ‘yeah’ could have any other meaning. What the heck, why stop there?

Joe nodded. “Yeah,” he concurred agreeably.

So what can we conclude? Ed will be second or third to fall to the Kabin Killer, allowing him screen time enough to really annoy us before we cheer his downfall. Beth will last a little longer; she will almost escape but will lose her glasses at the critical moment, the only point in the film where there is any doubt about the outcome. Finally Joe will be the one to discover the killer’s weakness but too late to save himself. His demise will be heroic, as he leaves the critical clue for the others to find. He will be the last male to die. That’s what a few well-placed nuances in the dialog will do for you.

Thanks!

Heisenberg’s Daughter

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Actually, it was not my intention to go into Heisenberg and the Human Condition, but one of the things about an exercise like this is that I let ideas come. There was quite a bit more particle physics in the result, but it was ruining the original mood I was shooting for, so I pared it down. Mood, after all, is what a quick little blurb like this is all about. (Although on that scale this piece still isn’t that consistent.) Anyway, here it’s:

Heisesnberg’s Daughter

She may still be out there somewhere. I hear rumors now and then. Moscow, or Cape Town, or Jackson Hole. She’s the kind of person who could be in any of those places. She could be anywhere. Her potential is everywhere; I feel it every time I walk into a room. Maybe this will be the time I see her again. Until I scan the room, listen for her laugh, there is a very real part of her there with me. But she is never there; where I am is the only place in the world she’s not. Then I will hear someone mention they saw her at a bar in the Frankfurt airport, a flash of light and laughter, a drink and a smoke and a story, and for one brief moment she will have a location, before leaving to catch a flight to no specific place, just out there somewhere. It must be lonely to be a wave when the rest of us all act like particles.

Or, she may be dead. Perhaps it is Schroedinger I should be invoking. That’s my girl; both dead and alive, and everywhere all at once. Everywhere, of course, except here. I expect I’ll never see her again. I’ve told that to the police, but they’re not yet convinced.

“How can she just leave you after all that?” one detective asked me. I didn’t bother to answer. If he ever meets her he’ll undestand. She left the same way she arrived; without warning she appeared out of nowhere, then just as abruptly she was gone, leaving my little apartment quieter than it ever had been before — if you don’t count the explosion and the nearly-incessant visits by various sorts of law enforcement officers, and other, less savory inquisitors. The explosion was minor; it’s the police that are the most annoying. I tell them all the same thing. She’s gone. All she left behind was a faint scent of exotic perfume, a t-shirt that says “Bite Me – please”, and a single red Chuck Taylor low-top. I never saw her wearing the shoes, I suspect she had already left the other somewhere in her wake. The cops carefully bagged the shirt and the shoe, and took my trash with them for good measure. My favorite carving knife is missing, but I don’t think the police took it. Perhaps the shoe was meant as an exchange.

I didn’t tell them about the sunglasses. Cheap Ray-Ban ripoffs with tooth marks on the earpieces. She used them while driving, but she spent more time with them hanging out of her mouth than wearing them normally. There’s nothing special about the shades, no reason to withhold them except that they were mine before they were hers. The lenses are a bit scratched up, but I still wear them sometimes. When I do, I feel like a gangster.

Thanks!

The Blahs

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It’s been going on for a while now. We all have our ups and downs. As emotional cycles go, mine tend to linger more in “up” territory, and the amplitude of my mood wave is fairly small. I’m a pretty steady guy. When I am feeling a little low, I’ll even nurse it, gravitating toward melancholy reading and letting it show in my writing. This last low spot has been, for whatever reason, different. The words, they have not come.

Saturday was a productive day, however, and I thought I was back on the upswing. Maybe I was. I could contemplate all the stuff I need to get done and decided that Sunday I’d hit the ground running and and least shift part of the mountain. I even wrote a bit of doggerel about it.

Nope. Sunday, the very giganticness of everything I needed to do lay on top of me like a ton of paper (heavier than a ton of lead), making it impossible to even sit up. (When I get the jers software hut email working again, it will be hours of work going through it all. And that’s just one fairly minor chore.) Complete paralysis. Knowing that I was failing in my resolve, that Jer’s Software Hut could be going down the toilet and I wouldn’t even know it, that I was missing deadlines, and so forth just added to the weight.

This is not like me. I blame global warming.

Today’s a little better, perhaps because I had to leave the house to eat. (Sunday’s fare: two slices of cheese and a can of pineapple slices. I should probably unplug the refrigerator.) I got a bit of writing done, the intro to a story I think I’ll post here so I don’t have to finish the story. I really do have a lot of better things to spend my writing time on.

Thanks!