I’ll go for not just casual vernacular but also he said she said.
If you write a character well, even a half dozen of them, the reader should be able to follow the conversation without constant identification of who said what. This skill is best built with three people to distinguish voice. It’s also good in two voices for clarity about words conveying emotion and movement.
Not every utterance has to be explained as said, loudly, whispered, sharply, sarcastically, angrily, etc.. That should be inherent to the text itself.
I pulled a novel after reading an article by Elmore Leonard about simply taking out all of the he said, she saids and letting it stand on it’s own. Or being forced to rewrite when the crutch is taken away. 500 pages and I went through just taking out explanatory lines about dialogue………the proof copy looks like a blood bath.
But the book is better because it forced me to make sure dialogue was individualistic, to notice who sounded alike, to breaking that apart. To a character graduating to having a fuller identity. To making the text sing for the reader rather than stop and start. I discovered that all the saids are like language door jams so that a book, like a long hallway lacked mystery or identity of warrens to be explored and inside was this cavernous echoing warehouse of over-explanation of every point of reality trying to capture reality.
It’s a lazy way of writing and arrogant because it assumes that my reader can’t join in and fill in reality, that I don’t trust them, that they’re too stupid to understand sarcasm or anger or teasing.
It also suggested that I was too lazy to really write and instead was just identifying look here at this now this now that now this now that now this now that now that now this again oh and that and that and that and that. Which is annoying.
Instead as a secure writer I paint a picture and you interpret it as you will but I make the colors and lines distinct enough that you can understand my intent.
That also gave me a lot more room for subtext because now dialogue is crisper, more relevant because I’m conscious of the economy of a sentence or a speech. It insures that as a writer I’m present to what needs to be said, what’s important to convey and then I can play with—-were you paying attention to what this person just said, can you feel them holding back, oversharing?
Taking out such descriptors to dialogue is the difference between making out and making love. Along the same continuum but one is advanced and mature and the other crowded by the sophomoric.
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