I just started the second season of Ricky Gervais’ After Life, and in the first episode they read aloud from a terrible, terrible novel. It made me feel very vulnerable. In some spots I was able to identify why it was bad (famous surgeon scrubs in to give someone an injection) and other spots sounded … I confess … just fine.
Those spots were mainly dialog. “Blah blah,” Joanne said.
Perhaps Ricky G is not of the school of “said”. I’ve been replacing “Maggie snarled,” with “Maggie said,” which is difficult because I’m avoiding adverbs around the dialog too. So, no “Maggie said, nastily” either.
Why am I making this hard on myself? I don’t know.
4 responses to “Rewriting the Novel: Cringey”
To go one farther, some novelists have moved to trying to avoid speech tags at all (which makes for a better audiobook).
(personally: if Maggie snarled, Maggie snarled, not said; that’s strong enough to differentiate. But yeah, most of the speech tags should be said; seeking endless variety is a good way to make a conversation sound *really* weird.)
KC – I agree. Back in the blog archives I was a big fan of snarled, then I converted.
Brace yourself for season 3, btw
Big Dot – oh god, who dies, or does he lose a limb or something?