For all the writers I know

[laurierobey]

From the Neil Gaiman blog entry on my friends list today:

Hi Neil! Like so many others, I'm an aspiring author who wants to ask your advice on some detail of the craft. This particular questionable detail is about adverbs and dialogue.

Various 'guides to good writing' have told me to avoid adverbs, calling them 'weak' and so forth. And especially to try and avoid the egregious Tom Swifties. And I've also been told not to fear using a simple "said" rather than resorting to more obscure terms like "implied", "gasped", "insinuated", and the all-time winner(?), "ejaculated". But I find that this combination of suggestions either leads to a long string of boring dialogue where the most exciting thing I can think to do is move the words "(s)he said" from the beginning to the middle to the end of the sentence, or alternately to me doing what I've been told not to in order to make things more lively (the more frequent outcome).

I plan to pay attention to this sort of thing in the next few stories and books I read, but the fact that I've never really noticed how good authors handle it leads me to believe it must be one of those subtle tricks that one only spots when it fails. So I was wondering if you had any words of advice as to how one can convey nuances of emotion or intonation in dialogue without either resorting to excessive adverbs or those alternatives to "said". (If you don't, I think I'll just go on using adverbs. They're in the language for a reason, after all.)

Thanks!

Curtana

Neil Gaiman writes back:

"Said's" are invisible. They vanish onto the page. The eye barely sees them -- they become one with the inverted commas that indicate that something is being said. They're the arrows on the speech balloons that show you who's saying what. Lots of authors, when they start out, remember from school that you shouldn't repeat words too much, and are careful to replace each "said" with "growled" "uttered" "yelped' "hissed" "exclaimed" "asseverated" "muttered" "affirmed" and so on, and cannot work out why people dismiss the writing as amateurish. Use them, but use them sparingly. It's like salt in a dish. Too much and it's all you taste.

I don't think there's anything wrong with adverbs (he asseverated, gnomishly) but I do tend to do a final read-through of anything I've written, deciding whether each adverb lives or dies, based really on whether it adds anything. If it's implicit in what I've already said in the book I chuck it out, bravely.