Heart and Soul
We have gripping descriptions. We have living, breathing characters. We have quite a lot of plot.
How do we pull it all together to make our readers burn with the bliss and suffer the sorrow of…well, our characters and plot?
Remember the idea that if you want the reader to care, the character has to care?
It has a corollary. If you want the reader to feel, the character have to show them what to feel.
Without the hints of what his emotions were, we, the reader, don’t know what emotion we are supposed to experience when an event occurs.
So how do we do this?
Society for the Preservation of the Adverb
The simplest way to express what a character’s emotion is just to say it, and the easiest way to say in a dialogue tag with an adverb.
“Hello!” he said jauntily.
“Goodbye,” she said glumly.
Pick up almost any older children’s book, Winnie the Pooh, Ramona the Pest, and you will find them filled with descriptive terms and adverbs. Why? Because children’s authors understand that children want to know. Simply, clearly, they want to know how the speaker is speaking. This matters to children. Is he angry? Is she happy?
It matters to many adult readers, too.
The idea that you should not use them was pioneered by Hemingway and made popular by some of the noir mystery writers. This was partially because both adverbs and these kind of words for said, were at one time overused. So it was new and chic to not use them.
But they were overused nearly a century ago. Most people today have never read the things that made people shy away from them.
Now, it is likely that every single other writing source you ever come upon will tell you not to do this.
Not me. I LOVE adverbs. I think they add spice and character. I am, in fact, a charter member of the Society for the Preservation of the Adverb.
I also love words for speaking that are not “said”.
“Hello,” he chuckled.
“Goodbye,” she hissed.
When I was a kid, I loved Anne McCaffery. I remember counting the words she used for “said” in one book: he laughed, she smiled, he grinned, she chortled, etc. I counted 22 such words.
I cannot express the admiration I felt for her as a teenager for being able to come up with 22 words for said, and I loved her books. I still love those books. I still admire her use of descriptive vocal words.
I have a brief funny story about this subject. When my Prospero series was slated to be published by Tor, my editor tried to talk me out of using adverbs and what he called said bookisms. (Apparently, long ago, there were “Said books” that had lists of other words you could use instead of said.)
I responded that I thought such language was appropriate for the type of fantasy I was writing. They added color.
He said, “They won’t sell.”
I countered, “But one of my favorite writers uses them all the time.”
He replied, “I bet their books don’t sell well. What’s the author’s name?”
I responded: “J. K. Rowling.”
He let me keep them.
Now, that we have defended the honor of these spice-like words, it is important to use them sparingly.
Like spices, a little makes the food much tastier, a lot can ruin it entirely. So you don’t want something like this in every line of dialogue, but one does not need to shy away from them entirely—they are a very quick way to get a lot of information across to the reader.
Let us pause and explore the myth that you don’t need to indicate emotion in dialogue. All you need to do is be skilled enough at writing dialogue to indicate the emotion.
That idea came from guys who wrote noir-style stories…where every single character is cynical all the time.
That system breaks down very quickly when your characters start exhibiting a wider range of human emotions or a character who doesn’t always say what he means, such as Mephestopheles Prospero from L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Prospero’s Children series:
“Everyone in my family is an idiot,” he said.
“Everyone in my family is an idiot.” He threw up his hands and twirled in a circle.
“Everyone in my family is an idiot,” he chirped cheerfully, throwing up his hands and twirling in a circle.
Anyone who got the same image from reading the first sentence that they did from the last one can drop out now. You do not need adverbs.
For the rest of us, could you tell from the first one that Mephisto was cheerful? Or did you hear in your head something much more like:
“Everyone is my family is an idiot,” he grumbled.
Sentence two might give the impression of someone speaking lightly, or, it might cause the reader to scratch their head and say, “Wha…huh? Why is his twirling? This writer makes no sense.”
Sentence three, however, is perfectly clear. The speaker’s words are at odds with his lighthearted, cheerful attitude.
When writing characters that subtle or complex, we cannot rely on mere words to properly communicate emotions. Spice-words, such as adverbs and synonyms for said can help close that gap.
But what if you want something a bit more subtle? Remember, we don’t want our meal of words to get too spicy.
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