Said-isms

[rolanni]

All righty, then.

I just read a reader review of a book (not one of ours) in which the reviewer was bitching and moaning about all the said-isms in the book. People never just said anything, the reviewer complained (um, oops), they whispered, murmured, hissed, cried, mumbled, &c -- and everyone knew that was Just Wrong.

Well, I'm going to 'fess up; I didn't know that it was wrong. And I'm going to go one step farther; "said" is an awfully boring word. Oh, it has its uses, and use it I do. But, honestly, if someone has murmured, why not say so? If she mumbles, or stammers at a certain point, that might, yanno, be a Clue. I'd think a whole page of dialogue broken only by "said" would put me right to sleep. Granted, I could be in a minority here.

So, I have some questions.

The first is, where do you learn that "said-isms" are "wrong?" and how come I never got the memo?

The second is, what are your feelings about "said-isms":

[Poll #1222698]

or -- feel free to discuss in comments.

Comments

[difrancis.livejournal.com]

You learn it in books and in classes. I talk about them in my writing classes--about how to use them properly. I voted okay because if I trip over them, then they annoy the hell out of me. I just read a book that was a romance and there's this climactic scene where the two main characters are sorting themselves out, and every time they spoke, it had a dialog tag that seemed slightly off, and also interrupted the flow. One was the word intoned and it so did not fit the scene at all.

I like using them and having them because they can subtly reinforce a lot of things in the scene, but it's when they are overused that I tend to stumble on them, or when the writer tries so hard to use different ones every time, that they start getting noticeable. And then too, when we travel long driving trips, I'm often the book on tape. I read my husband the Harry Potter novels, and found myself skipping reading a whole lot of the saids because they were accompanied by so many adverbs, that I began to feel self-conscious about them. Weird, huh?

[jack_calls_dances]

What she said.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

You learn it in books and in classes.

This is what I get for teaching myself how to write by reading.

I like using them and having them because they can subtly reinforce a lot of things in the scene,

That's why I like them, too; they're especially good for suggesting emotional depth in a long dialog -- a tool I use often, because my characters always talk too much.

[ldyavalon.livejournal.com]

When I was at school back in Merry Ol' I remember a teacher telling us never to use "said" if we could avoid it, because "said-isms" describe how the character is feeling...