Folamh3
User ID: 1175
The How Not to Write a Novel example is referring to the use of "said" in speech tags for directly quoted dialogue, not when summarising a series of interactions in narration. There's a separate passage in the book in which they specifically encourage writers to summarise incidental dialogue much like your second example, rather than quoting it directly. The example they gave is something to the effect of:
Making her excuses, Sarah sat down to lunch with Jane.
as opposed to
"Sorry I'm late," Sarah said. "Traffic was mental."
"Don't worry about it," Jane said. "I've only been waiting five minutes."
"Oh, that's not too bad," Sarah said.
Personally, I can't recall ever reading a book which I thought was too boring and monotonous specifically because the writer failed to use enough synonyms for "said". Maybe you're talking primarily about journalism, but I think if I read a novel which featured the speech tag Joe expanded, I would probably roll my eyes. It strikes me as part of a register which is inappropriate for most fiction.
Folamh3
12hr ago
How Not to Write a Novel:
Published authors use the word "said" almost exclusively when they wish to indicate that a particular character is saying something. "Said" is a convention so firmly established that readers for the most part do not even see it. This helps to make the dialogue realistic by keeping its superstructure invisible.
Many unpublished authors, however, become uncomfortable with the repetition of the word "said" and try to improve the technology of dialogue by substituting any verb that has ever been associated with speech or language.
A particularly egregious version of this occurs when an author conflates a stage direction with the desire to avoid the word "said" and instead of writing "You and what army,” he said, thrusting out his jaw or he asked, quirking a brow, produces something like "Hello,” he thrusted or "Are you going to finish that?” he quirked.The only thing any of this does, though, is draw attention to the unconventional verb, which reminds the reader that there is an author, who is struggling mightily to avoid the word "said".
There are of course exceptions: "asked" is used for questions, "shouted" is used for a character who is doing so, and there will occasionally be a good reason to use a word other than "said" for plain speech. But spicing things up with "importuned," "vociferated", or "clamored" will sabotage any attempt to make conversation sound real.
Folamh3
20hr ago
Normally when a personality questionnaire asks you to rate how accurately an adjective describes you, they either use a single adjective (neurotic) or a series of closely related adjectives (anxious, worrisome, moody). This is the first time I recall seeing a questionnaire asking me how much a group of (to my eyes) completely independent adjectives describes me.
Folamh3
21hr ago
To me, that sounds more like a person's educational attainment is irrelevant to how attractive you find them.
Folamh3
1d ago
For a second there I was like "what do you mean, make a low dynamic range work?"
Folamh3
1d ago
I'm curious why you ask "I'd like a partner who is..." and two of the options are "educated" and "uneducated". Surely the response to one of these on a Likert scale is just the inverse of the response to the other?
Folamh3
1d ago
Seconded, many of these adjective pairs aren't really synonymous. Many people are active (in the sense of being physically fit) but not talkative, and vice versa. "Carefree" to me suggests "lacking in neuroticism/anxiety", not lacking in moral principles.
Folamh3
2d ago
Paging @DuplexFields. As previously discussed, you owe me a mea culpa.
Folamh3
2d ago
Why do you need sync if you're only going to write at the disconnected setup?
I'm not. My first preference is to write at home on my laptop disconnected from the internet, but I'll also need to write on my phone during my commute.
I started reading Kafka's The Trial yesterday, and I was reminded of Jonathan Franzen's Ten Rules for Novelists:
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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
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Never use the word then as a conjunction—we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.
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Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
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When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
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The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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You have to love before you can be relentless.
I disagree with a lot of this, but #8 jumped out at me. I have ~65k words of an unfinished novel that I want to finish in February. I've been writing it in Google Docs specifically so that I can work on it on my phone on the train. Ideally, I would like to work on it on my laptop with the internet disconnected, to avoid distraction. I understand that you can work on a Google Docs document offline, and the document will sync automatically as soon as you reconnect. My question is, can anyone recommend a piece of software that will prevent my computer from connecting to the internet for a fixed period of time? The workflow I'm envisioning is, I get home from work, sit down at my laptop, disconnect the Internet and set this up such that I can't reconnect for an hour or ninety minutes or whatever. If this piece of software could also block me from opening certain applications (e.g. Steam, VLC) during the period as well, that would be even better.
Folamh3
2d ago
They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra just for you.
Last week I finished Katalin Street by Magda Szabó. It was pretty good, though I doubt I'll read it again. On Thursday I started Boy Parts by Eliza Clark and it was so compulsively readable I had it finished by Saturday. It touches on a wealth of CW topics: female violence, the male gaze, false accusations of rape, whether there's any meaningful difference between fetish art and porn. Ultimately ends up feeling a bit like an extremely online, gender-flipped version of American Psycho. Very impressive, especially for a debut from such a young writer, even if I did feel like Clark was pulling her punches slightly.
Started The Trial by Kafka last night.
Folamh3
3d ago
I am not a particularly rich or exceptionally handsome guy, but some of the girls I could date easily were definitely the top of their societies in these aspects
If I'm parsing this correctly, you mean that you're not particularly wealthy in your home country, but were unusually wealthy relative to the typical standard of wealth in the countries in which you were travelling. A sort of comparative advantage?
Folamh3
3d ago
we have no problem with other types of sexual tourism that don’t involve money. Rafa told me a story of one of his German friends who used Tinder Plus as an alternative to hostels in Latin America. Although all these women were consenting to this German man sleeping over and presumably having sex with them, the relationship was no less exploitative than if cash was used. Dreams of being taken away to the West, higher status in one’s local community (for bagging a Blanco), are two big non-amorous factors at play in this situation that many would find just as damaging to the individual women and the local community than if cash was exchanged.
I don't see how this is meaningfully different from any sexual/romantic relationship between a wealthy man and a poor woman which doesn't lead to marriage (or an otherwise committed relationship). What you're describing is a critique of the sexual revolution, not a critique of the relationship between the global north and the global south.
Folamh3
5d ago
I suspect the dominant reason for the lack of eskimo rocket scientists is, firstly, lack of eskimos, and secondly, a culture that doesn't value education because they're still partly a traditional culture and the more urbanized ones are, well, impressively culturally dysfunctional.
Also the extremely high rate of alcoholism. There are very few rocket scientists who are functional alcoholics.
Folamh3
5d ago
I think a more interesting subject is why these difference exist. Is there any settled science on this?
I think rate of consanguine marriage is a major contributing factor. I haven't read it yet, but my understanding is that this was one of the main conclusions of Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: Europe became a dominant economic power in large part because it had a headstart in banning cousin marriage. If you compare a world map showing the average IQ in each country with a world map showing the rate of cousin marriage in each country they look very strongly negatively correlated.
Fair enough. Offhand I can't recall an instance in which I thought a piece of journalism was sapped of interest by overuse of the word "said" but I'll keep an eye out for it in future.
Because I have too much time on my hands, I re-read one of my favourite pieces of journalism: "Shattered Glass" by Buzz Bissinger. Out of 45 speech tags, I count 30 "saids".
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