Disclaimer: This was written for my own amusement and is not meant to be taken seriously as writing advice, only my opinion on some writing advice I want to ignore, perhaps because I’m lazy, so I’m going to rationalize my laziness into an act of courageous rebellion. He said guiltily.

Just realized I haven’t put out a blog since April 7^th.

I have written four or five in that time, but they were all… flawed. Either rehashes of old discussions, but with added anger, or trying to work something out in public, with impatient vehemence as the tone. (Anger again.)

Why was I writing angry?

Because these are annoying times. As a writer, as a human. It is frustrating to watch our world be pushed toward disaster and depression by self-interested morons who at best possess a very limited concept of consequences that is wholly insufficient for the task of governance. Oops, there’s that anger again. Maybe with a slice of trepidation shading/escalating into fear.

Sigh. I sighed. He sighed.

But you can’t use ‘he sighed’ at the end of a dialogue entry in a novel. That’s against the rules. You can only use ‘he said’ or leave the attribution blank. I have accepted this advice, and the rationale that what the character is saying in their actual speech should convey if they are complaining, responding, explaining, retorting, exclaiming or otherwise speaking in a way that has a word in the English language to describe it. And of course when you sigh, you sigh, you don’t (tend to) speak through the act of sighing, he sighed. So I get that too. However, “For Fuck’s sake,” he sighed is totally doable. Personally road-tested many times over. And you can say FFS in any number of ways, so sighing it would indicate a definite meaning in a way that ‘he said’ would not. Is he sighed an attribution or an action there, I wonder?

Be that as it may, I want to rebel against the narrow confines of this ‘said or nothing’ rule. It seems overly prescriptive. Understatement isn’t always enough to let a reader know someone is deploying dry humor, for instance. The person could just be being blunt, tired, disinterested, impatient. Yes, there is context, but how far does that go? Once you’ve established a character’s tendency for the dry three word response that is actually funny, it’ll work, but can you establish that by context alone? Not at first. You’ll have to hope the reader gets it after a while. Which is kind of how dry humor works anyway. Oh damn, I’m disproving my own point.

I’m attributing the attributionless manuscript, if you hadn’t guessed. And I’m finding I like replied, responded, interjected etc., because in the context of a 4 to 5 way conversation I feel those are needed to identify which person is stepping in to the conversation, and he or she said alone is not cutting it. I am of course also using physical cues and actions to make it clear who is speaking, or answering any particular utterance. Not used uttered though, but why not? It’s a perfectly good word that serves that purpose, no?

I’m thinking about bucking the dry trend of said only. He said tentatively. Yes, throwing in an adverb to really piss the purists off. He crowed. Is the said or nothing minimalism a 20^th century convention grown monstrous? Did the 19^th century classics also follow that rule? What shall I find in Middlemarch, or Jude the Obscure? (He wondered, redundantly, given the question mark’s presence – I won’t go that far and actually say wondered in practice when a question mark is there, I will retain some restraint! He said jovially, or jocularly. Hahaha, I’m enjoying this!)

And that is the point, isn’t it? To enjoy yourself? I sometimes wonder, in the blizzard of rules that are set for writers, that the joy is sucked quite completely out of the experience. Or rather, you can enjoy the first draft, (that seems to be agreed upon) but then joylessly fix it (because it is riddled with mistakes, and it is – but is the joy of its creation one of those mistakes to be fixed? I think not.), all work and no play making Jack a dull boy indeed. Must rewrites and edits be a chore, a grind, an intellectual wresting match with the perfect as prescribed? Fuck that, I say with love.

Making writing a task, a headache-inducing frown-imposing mental trial is the perfect way to kill the act of writing. Reducing it to formulae that if deviated from render it ‘improper’ is unwise, in my opinion.

So: let yourself break some rules, if it grants you joy, feeds your creative spirit. As long as the script would still be intelligible to the reader, go for it. Let rules lawyers and grammar nazis mutter grumpily under their breath at what they see, as if what you’ve written is engaging enough, they’ll turn the page anyway.

Next time: the advice to limit your vocabulary so you don’t alienate/antagonize the reader. I have thoughts.