Attributions are those little phrases that come after, before or in the middle of a piece of dialog. You've seen them: he muttered, she cursed, they yelled, we said.
For awhile it seemed to be taboo to resort to "he said." Readers found it boring. Or perhaps it was the writers who found it boring. Or maybe it was the English teacher who insisted the same verb not be used twice on one page that prompted authors find another ways to mark dialog.
Things change.
In their book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Renni Browne and Dave King open their chapter on dialog mechanics by quoting this review of Robert Ludlum's book The Bourne Ultimatum: "Characters…seldom "say" anything. Instead, they cry, interject, interrupt, muse, state, counter, conclude, mumble, whisper…, intone, roar, exclaim, fume, explode, mutter. There is one especially unforgettable tautology: "'I repeat,' repeated Alex."
I'm sure there are some who would argue that the critic is paid to be critical and this one peculiarity he focuses on does little to diminish the overall story. (I don't know, because I've not read the book.) But the point important to consider is this: If the attributions intruded on one reader's enjoyment of the book, perhaps the problem encroaches on the story for others as well.
Your goal as a fiction writer is to immerse your reader in a story, not the mechanics of how the story is put together. It can be compared to watching figure skaters. They make their craft look so easy until they falter and we're reminded of how difficult the art really is. In a perfect performance, we never take our interest off the performance to think about the mechanics of it.
So how do you get an attribution to fade into the woodwork and still do its job? In fact, what is the job of an attribution? The purpose of an attribution is only to convey to your reader who is speaking. There is no other job for an attribution.
Human nature looks for the easy way to do anything. It is easier to use attributions to do the job the dialog itself should do.
For example, it is easier to simply tell the reader how a character is feeling, and to do that in an attribution:
"I can't believe he's really dead," she said sadly.
In this case, the words themselves make the description in the attribution unnecessary. A death is generally sad. To tell your reader what s/he already knows is talking down to him or her, and is generally not well received.
But what if the speaker isn't sad? Is it justifiable to say:
"I can't believe he's really dead," she said joyously.
There probably is a better way to convey the information that makes the description in the attribution unnecessary. If you have set the scene up properly, it shouldn't be a surprise to your readers that she'll be happy about this death. Ideally you want to have your readers feeling the same thing the character does rather than having the feeling simply reported to them.
Remember that when you tell something that's all the reader knows. When you show it, you have the opportunity to reveal a little more about the character as well. Then the dialog fulfills its two-fold purpose to move the story forward and reveal character. If you say directly that your protagonist is sad, then that's all the reader knows. If you show how she's sad--that she won't eat, can't sleep, wanders the cemetery at night--then you've allowed the reader to know your character a little more and to feel the experience.
A quick way to clean up your dialog, is to look for -ly words in your attributions. Browne and King assert that it is good to "cut virtually every one you write." Why?
Words that end in -ly are adverbs and you'll find
that nearly every one of them explains the dialog--
"smuggling emotions into speaker attributions that belong in
the dialogue itself.," say Browne and King. Remember, if
your dialog doesn't need the prop, putting it in talks down to
your reader. If it does need the prop, it's time to rework the
dialog so that it stands on its own.
Remember too that it is impossible to chuckle a sentence. "That's cute," he chuckled is physically impossible. Descriptions of this sort are beats and should be punctuated differently:
"That's cute." He chuckled.
We'll look more closely at beats in upcoming workshop notes.
Browne and King conclude, "…when you're writing speaker attributions the right verb is nearly always said." They give these reasons:
Verbs other than said tend to draw attention away from the dialog. They draw attention to your technique, and a technique that distracts the reader is never a good idea.
Said has become "almost a mechanical device--more like a punctuation mark than a verb. It's absolutely transparent, which makes it graceful and elegant."
If the reader can tell who's talking just from reading the dialog then attributions are unnecessary altogether. Just be careful of the tendency to use character's names too often when doing away with attributions. It doesn't sound natural:
"Can you come to the party, Tony?"
"I'm afraid I can't Jill. I have a business meeting in Toronto."
"But Tony it will be so boring without you!"
"How sweet of you to say so, Jill."
One way to make even a "said" attribution intrusive is to start a paragraph with it. Always start with dialog and add the attribution in where there is a natural break in what is being said. It's also best to place the name first: Pam said instead of said Pam.
Don't get hung up on the mechanics of attributions during a rough draft. However, making yourself aware of what works and what doesn't can help you write better dialog the first time through leaving less to edit.
If you are editing, here's a checklist for attributions:
Mark explanations mentioned outside the dialog in the attributions. Cut those and see how the dialog reads. If it works without the explanation, why put it in? If it doesn't work try re-writing the dialog so that the attribution isn't trying to do a job it's not supposed to do.
Mark all '-ly adverbs and determine if they are necessary. (Occasionally some are!)
Check attributions for verbs other than said, like snarled or laughed, that are physically impossible.
Can the reader determine who is speaking without the attribution? If so, then there isn't a job for the attribution and it isn't necessary.
©2005Dekat
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Last Modified: October 20, 2004