"Said" Before Or After The Name In Fantasy?

As I said earlier, it's a matter of style. Still, I must admonish you that, for some people, reading is hard and they need all the help they can get. So when harvesting "saids" from your manuscript, please be sure you have left enough of them to leave the reader unconfused.

And, at this point, I would advise you also to be careful when trying to break up the word "said" with "gasped," "shouted," "breathed," "intoned," or "whispered." "Said" is fine as it is, unless it isn't.

And above all, avoid using too many modifiers with "said." You know, "he said loudly," "she said sharply," "they said snarkily," or whatever. Overused, they tend to weaken the prose, and lend themselves to unintentional "Tom Swifties:"

"There must be thousands of them!" he said grandly.
"Yeah, we're down 32--0, but we're not out of this yet," he said gamely.

 

I agree, mostly. You could use "John said" sometimes, or some alternate form like "he answered quietly", but in all honesty, for the most part you could eliminate any form of "said" and just use an action to show his emotional state at the moment.

 

One of the basic values of forums like this is that they are repositories for discussion, to be referenced by anybody interested in the subject. In that sense, they are libraries, and if somebody comes around years later and has something to add, it's like another book has been added to the shelf. No harm in that.

 

It's pretty important, if you're using pronouns, to ensure that the reader will know exactly who the pronoun refers to. It's especially problematic when there are more than two people in a scene, or if only two people are in the scene but they are both the same gender.

I've done a fair amount of beta-reading for new writers, and this is a common problem. They can get carried away writing the scene, and THEY know who is saying what ...but the reader might pick it up wrongly. And if the reader gets it wrong, chaos can ensue! So I'd say to be cautious with the pronouns.

Example:

John threw the book across the room. “I am fed up with this project. And I’m fed up with you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” David tried to stay calm. “Is there anything I can do to change things?”

“You know there is.”

“Well, give me a clue.”

He just sat there in silence.

“Do we just give up then?” he said. He was angry now. “I can’t help fix this, if you don’t give me a clue.”

........
and etc. That kind of dialogue exchange can leave the reader unsure of who is saying what, and if they have to stop to work it out, that interrupts the flow of the story.

Maybe try:

John threw the book across the room. “I am fed up with this project. And I’m fed up with you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” David planned stay calm, even though it was probably a doomed strategy. “Is there anything I can do to change things?”

“You know there is.”

“Well, give me a clue,” David said. When John continued to sit there in silence, still saying nothing, arms folded, refusing to meet his eye, David figured it was time to let his irritation show. “Do we just give up, then? I can’t help fix this if you don’t give me a clue.”

.......
Okay, banal scene. But I think the second offering is easier to follow, especially if the dialogue exchange continues beyond this point.

 

I was also thinking maybe in high fantasy, but something else occurs. Something extremely British perhaps? Though it might be modified thusly: "So what'ya want then gov'nah?" Says 'e, and I says to 'im I says "Well, what'ya got?"

Or I could see using it in something like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But that comes under the heading of 'Older books' I guess. And also extremely British.

"Well, which way is that then?" Said Alice to the rabbit.

"Why, whichever way you're going!" Said he.

It also reminds me of schoolkids in Leave it to Beaver or some other 50's show learning proper English. Like when they'd say on the phone "This is he." and "Whom shall I say is calling?"

 

It might be related to that thing where as Americans we got scrubbed of a lot of dialect and accent customs because, as I understand it, we picked up habits of what was known as Plainspeak from the natives. As a Midwesterner who doesn't have much of an accent or dialect (always a highly debatable statement) people from other countries almost seem to be singing when they talk. It's like we removed all the musicality from our language, except in certain areas like the South and New York/New Jersey. It was still there in the Midatlantic dialect, back when people used it (you know, those old speeches like 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.")

But there are pockets where people speak very musically all around America, like upper class Boston, Valley Girl speech, etc. And there's that thing where the English started speaking like the French to add some musicality and lilt to their speech. But it almost seems like the more well educated an American is, the more you lose the musicality and use plainspeak. I think we also keep dropping convoluted conventions of sentence construction like "Said he."

 

Definitely one of my worst sins. It often shows up in first drafts and has to be edited out. It especially shows up at times when I'm having fun playing around with wording and sentence structure etc, as I sometimes do.

 

Plus there's just something in particular about the English and the way they speak. Look at some of the greatest actors like for instance Anthony Hopkins. Their speech is powerful and has all kinds of subtleties to it, but when they're really good they seem to be able to almost speak the world into being. Monty Python was a strongly language-based or speech-based comedy troupe. It was the things they said combined with the way they said them that made it so great. And I just realized, I do use the term "Speak the world into being" for certain imaginative works, like Alice in Wonderland, where it's the way characters speak and their oddities of language that seem to create the story world.

There was something I noticed when I was reading Treasure Island a while back, and it was also in the way Boris Karloff talked in The Body Snatcher. There's a certain type of English ruffian who really overdetermines their speech. They talk everything into being and out of it. They seem to need to talk about everything that's happening, to the extent of narrating what other characters are doing. I remember writing something like this about it on the What Are You Reading Now thread:

"Aye Jim lad, that's it. Lift the cup for me. There's a good boy, help poor Billy Bones, this old dying pirate, get some ale in 'im. But what's this, do ye fear me lad? Why does your arm tremble? Come near boy, come closer, and let old Billy look into yer face one last time."

Literally like he needs to narrate the entire situation. I don't know what it is, something about the English and the way they speak. It seems to be a particular skill of theirs. To me all of this is somehow related to the "Said he" thing. It's a revelling in the force and musicality of the language.

All that overtalking might come from a theater convention, but I think some English people actually do it. So do some Americans, but it just isn't the same. Though the ones who do it seem to be in love with the sound of their own voice.

 

It's not a question of grammar, it's a question of rhythm and vague connotation. It lends itself to an iambic cadence really well, which gives a rolling quality to dialogue. It does sound older, perhaps quaint, so it patinas the dialogue a little, it kind of glazes it over with a slight warmth. Maybe it sounds a little Irish, or something a Cajun storyteller would say. It's the sort of thing a raconteur uses when he's spinning a story to you, it has something to do with a purely narrative focus. It's not literary; it's definitely an evocation of a spoken style. It's a kind of winking in writing. If you want the reader to think of you with a sparkle in your eye and the beer flush in your cheeks, you write, "said he." I think it's that simple. It would be very wrong in a lot of styles, but sometimes it's right.

 

There is a thing in Irish use of English that carries over from Gaelic, whose syntax generally puts verb first, then subject. The Irish for "he says" is "dúirt sé", with dúirt meaning says and sé meaning he. Says he is quite common in spoken language around here, also in the written word, so much so I'd probably not notice which order was set in a text. Also, the tradition of oral lore was strong up to the advent of TV and there's still a few seanchaí doing the rounds, though mostly as TV specials than anything else. Their speech would most closely mirror the old Gaelic phrasing and manner of speaking.

 

The bane of all writers, and all copy editors. Computer programmers yearn for a "DWIM" key on their keyboards. It stands for "Do What I Mean." And any writer can relate to that.

That sort of structure was popularized by Time magazine as a way of introducing a sort of breezy, informal style to their copy. One writer commenting on it in The New Yorker (I think), wrote: "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind."

Monty Python's American counterpart was the Firesign Theatre, a radio troupe quite popular in the 1970s. It was also strongly language-based, with parodies of advertising lingo, a zillion accents (some quite good), and an acute sense of the absurd and the surreal. Their parodies of the formats of old radio (situation comedies, detective stories, news coverage, and so on) show their love for those genres through on all their records.

And as with Monty Python, what many listeners thought was improvising was actually reading from a carefully prepared script. And, like Python, they were heavily influenced by Spike Milligan and the Goon Show.

How this group never got a Grammy for comedy I'll never know.

 

Another place where people literally seem to "Speak the world into being" is in postmodern comedies like Bill & Ted, Jay & Silent Bob, Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, etc. I think it originates in children's stories with a strong emphasis on how characters talk, or maybe plays made for kids. I mean decades ago or earlier, before everything made for kids became all sanitized and scrubbed clean. Back when they knew kids had powerful imaginations and could handle many things at nearly an adult level.

I suddenly remembered a play my mom took me and my sister to see when we were kids called Wiley and the Hairy Man. It definitely has this element of speaking the story world into being. Here it is read by a storyteller with the right kind of rhythms and inflections and dialect etc:



And here by someone who ain't got no rhythm:



It seems to me in America, as we become more educated, we drop all colorful manners of speaking and try to sound objective and dry and intellectual.

I'm not sure exactly what we're doing here, but somehow I know all this stuff is related.

EDIT—I've listened to a little more of the second one, and now I see he actually does change the way he speaks when he does dialogue. I had only heard the very beginning. But compare and contrast the flat parts with the more musical/accented parts. It still gets across the point I was trying to make.

 

^ When I saw the play it was done with all white actors, but in hillbilly style. They all wore coveralls with big patches on them, and straw hats, and walked around chewing on pieces of straw doing hillbilly accents. That really made it fun.

 

A couple books on dialog I have read, recommend mixing up dialog tags, before, after, and in the middle of the dialog. As a way of not boring the reader. Using said either before or after the name seems to fall into the catagory.

 

I await a performance of Shakespeare with that cast. I will pay good money for it.

Some modern-dress performances work startlingly well. Sir Ian McKellen did Richard III in a Fascist England. My favorite bit (spoiler alert!) is when he gets his Jeep stuck in the mud and cries "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

And Sir Patrick Stewart did a Macbeth in a Stalinist setting, complete with bloody purges of his enemies. It gave the play a historical context that we could relate to.

In Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, Nathan Fillion does a nice bit with the Constable's line "Call up me." As he delivers it, he makes the universal "I'm on the phone" hand gesture with thumb and pinkie. Nice touch, that.

 

And it be year'n an' year'n since it had anything to do with fantasy.