Navel gazing

[eve11]

A discussion elsewhere (and a bit from wrisomifu earlier) had me thinking about dialogue words and "said" synonyms. In general, I am with the "go with 'said', it's a non-word" camp on the issue. I don't go around looking for synonyms. I also tend to structure sentences as ["dialogue." Description. "more dialogue."] and variants, without necessarily using any kind of "said" word. This helps me to avoid the dreaded synonym-for-said-that-doesn't-actually-involve-talking difficulty that seems to plague some writers.

I checked a few different stories and am seeing what looks like an interesting zipf-like distribution in my dialogue word choices. The bulk of my choices are made up of one of 4 choices: either no explicit 'said' word, "said", "asked" or "answered". No 'said' word (denoted by '-') and "said" together make up well over 50% of my dialogue choices in the stories I looked at. Have a table of 5 stories:

Story             #Dialogue   "said"    "-"       Total
                   Lines
WIP-o-Doom         431        0.2041763 0.3689095 0.5730858
HumpDay Party Mix  104        0.3653846 0.3365385 0.7019231
Sage Advice         46        0.3913043 0.3695652 0.7608696
Avocado WIP         31        0.3548387 0.2903226 0.6451613
Still Life          27        0.3333333 0.3703704 0.7037037

Also I can't believe the WIP-o-Doom is nearly 40K words and has only 431 dialogue passages. It feels like way more.
Because I'm ridiculous I also did a graph of dialogue words for this story:




The tails of this distribution also include "said [adverb]" phrases. Also, this is a nice way to figure out what kinds of phrases I might be over-using (not counting 'said'; it's a non-word).

I suppose I should actually try to write something tonight instead of mucking with numbers.

ETA: Nope! Another graph, I used The Hump Day Party Mix because it is the longest thing I've finished in a good long while. Graph below:



Interestingly, the WIP-o-Doom is 10 times longer than this story and contains 79 unique said synonyms in its passages to this story's 28 unique synonyms.

Comments

[bexxa.livejournal.com]

There was a time I'd've agreed with the "go with 'said'."

Then I listened to several John Scalzi audio books, and the unrelenting "saids" became nails on a chalkboard.

Might've been a different matter if I'd been reading hard copy rather than listening to audio - but the read-out-loud made it impossible to ignore.

Just my two cents.

[eve11]

Yeah, I think the way to get around unrelenting "said"-s is to use context to remove the structure of "said" words when they are not needed. With audio books I think it also makes the 'said' words more unnecessary since the reader is generally doing some kind of voices too. But it also depends on cadence, too.

[bexxa.livejournal.com]

First person, I think, makes "said" that much more pervasive, but even with the character voices in audio, there are only so many ways someone can utter the word without calling attention to itself.

[eve11]

For me it's one of those things that I will not notice until suddenly I do, you know? But I don't think that unrelentingly using whatever synonym you can think of for 'said' is the answer either, because that can become just as jarring.

[clocketpatch]

I've noticed that some audio books (and podficcers) leave out the said tags when they're doing voices. Which makes sense to me. In print, the said tag is necessary for the reader not to get lost in the who-said-what, plus it fades into the background, but when being read out loud the differing voices takes care of that and the tag becomes redundant.

[last01standing.livejournal.com]

I am pretty much in the said camp myself, though I know I have a terrible no good habit of neglecting to do tags to dialogue at all.

[eve11]

If it doesn't need a tag, there's no reason to include them unless you want it there for the purposes of flow. I think I end up using 'said' statements when it seems like my characters would be pausing for a breath or something like that.

[clocketpatch]

This was very interesting -

To the point where it made me curious and I went and analyzed some of my own fic. I did three: one I wrote two days ago, one from a few years back, and one from when I was just beginning to get into fic.

I discovered that in two of the fics I was about one-third more likely to use no said tag/description than I was to use said, while in the other I was about as likely to say said as I was to use description. Said and asked are my most common tags, and I've definitely become more conservative with the... creative... tags as the years have gone by. (Discovery #2, I apparently thought "ejaculated" was an okay tag word seven years ago. Oh my god. No. *slaps past self*)

I think I'm going to try this out on the god awful fantasy novella I wrote when I was 15 to see if the description/nothing preference is something I've always done, or if it only showed up when I started writing fic.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Yeah...I do other words than 'said'. Cause it (like any other word) can be overused. Always trying to find new words and phrasing because I'm terrible about using the same ones over and over again.

*HUGS*

[pwinkler.livejournal.com]

I hear good stories are edited, not written. Given this, I would put anything down that comes to mind while writing and tweak as necessary later. It's like premature optimization otherwise.