Seeing past the shine.

[elfs]

One of my favorite fan writers, Nickolai Mirovich, has the strange habit of writing Pokemon' erotica novels. Thankfully, all of the erotica is between the human characters, but the fact is that in the past three years he's released a trilogy of novels around Misty and Miranda, the shortest; was 40,000 words (that's a novel by Hugo and Nebula standards, although by RWA standards it's just a "novella"), the longest over 130,000. These are books-- and they demand as much reading power as a book. The third was surprisingly good, and while the de rigeur pokemon battle at the end is well written, the encounter between Miranda and her estranged stepfather is what really makes the novel worth reading. (The title of the chapter is, "Luke, I am not your... Oh never mind.") His power is characterization; he just makes his characters come alive, and his ability to change points of view smoothly is so natural that I am pained with envy. I'm so bad at it that I consider any story where I change points of view to be strictly experimental.

I was re-reading his third novel, Misty and Miranda: Halloween Story, when I realized that he has one terrible habit. His characters rarely "say" anything. Instead, they (in order of appearance in chapter one, eliminating duplicates) comment, exclaim, grumble, chuckle, instruct, ask, inquire, mutter, apologize, assure, laugh, whisper, and then finally someone says something.

The correct word in many of these places is "said." To write, "'Well, fine!' he exclaimed," is to belabor the point. "'Take this to her,' she instructed," likewise sends the same message twice.

Sometimes, it's okay to write, "She whispered..." I've seen writers twist their writing into all kinds of weird shapes to avoid using anything except "said." David Weber gets a nice balance, but in long dialogues has often resorted to having the characters make pointless physical motions and gestures just so he can name them in a paragraph and indicate the speaker.

Just something I noticed today while waiting to have my head examined.

Comments

A surprisingly common problem

[foxcutter.livejournal.com]

I've not read of the novels (though I think you mentioned them to me at one time) I've found that not using said is a common problem among a lot of armature authors, and a few pros.

It's right up there with renaming things for no reason other then they are a bit different. It's something a good editor will get on your back about to work on.

You might want to post a link to said stories, I'm sure I'm not the only one who reads you're journal who would enjoy reading what you recommend

--Fox