Occasionally, the narrator can switch voices or tones when a different person is speaking. Or you could even have multiple voice performers, but that would be rather expensive.
Occasionally, the narrator can switch voices or tones when a different person is speaking. Or you could even have multiple voice performers, but that would be rather expensive.
Does she work for the Department of Redundancy Department? Or maybe even the Redundant Department of Redundancy Department?
That actually reads like the filled-out example at the beginning of a Mad Libs book, e.g.,
(although the example I remember used "Gadzooks!" as the exclamation)
Hmm. Too bad Mel Blanc is no longer with us, and his son Noel has gotten out of voice acting.
I've seen it argued that the dialogue should ideally convey everything the reader needs to know about the speaker's attitude without any descriptive narration at all, but I'm skeptical. In acting, a lot of performance is subtext -- what the actors convey below and beyond the words, conveying nuance through performance that the words alone can't convey. Sometimes the subtext is in direct opposition to the words, like when a character is saying something they don't actually mean, whether they're just being sarcastic or hiding their true feelings or fooling themselves or whatever. I think it's important to add something beyond the dialogue to suggest subtext. To some extent, you can do that by... adding punctuation that... conveys loaded pauses, or, or h-having characters stammer and, and repeat themselves, but it can also be valuable to describe expression, body language, etc.
All of GraphicAudio's audiobooks, including the ones I've written, are full-cast productions with music and sound effects -- basically audio dramas with book-like narration. They usually feature ensembles of between 15-30 performers. They've done hundreds of them, so it can't be that hard to pull off. There's also Britain's Big Finish, which has done probably thousands of full-cast audio dramas based on Doctor Who and other series.
Thanks for the kind words, although I suppose one can argue that the audience for TOS novels possibly skews older than average. Indeed, at bookstore signings these days, I often hear comments along the lines of, "Oh, my dad loves that old show!" or "Oh, I need to get that for my mom! She'll love it!"
Speaking of sex scenes: Early on, when I was just starting out, an editor offered to buy a horror story from me if I made an implied sex scene more explicit. To be clear, their motive was not prurient or crassly commercial; they simply felt that I had been overly coy and discreet when it came to a crucial encounter, which the story had been kinda building to for its entire length. (I suspect that said editor was also trying to push me out of my comfort zone to broaden my skill set as it were.)
For what it's worth, I made the sex scene much more explicit -- and I have since sold that story to at least two different anthologies.
On the other hand, there are authors (even good authors) whose characters tend to talk rather similarly to each other — this was my experience of Zelazny’s Amber books, for example. In those cases, in a long conversation where all the dialogue is presented just by itself without any “Corwin said”s, it can be easy for the reader to lose track of who is saying what, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen cases where the author plainly did.
^I've worried while editing the books I'm editing that the characters don't necessarily have distinctive voices, and I haven't been sure what to do about that, or even whether I'm making something out of nothing.
It's not helped by the fact that there's often a significant number of characters ostensibly conversing at the same time, but then you need to balance the fact that not everyone is going to have anything to say with not making it look as though the author has entirely forgotten about them.
The 'worst' example of this is that one of the characters has a blue jay "familiar", for lack of a better term, and at one point I had to note that there'd been no mention of the bird for about 1/3 of the book.
It's not helped by the fact that there's often a significant number of characters ostensibly conversing at the same time, but then you need to balance the fact that not everyone is going to have anything to say with not making it look as though the author has entirely forgotten about them.
The 'worst' example of this is that one of the characters has a blue jay "familiar", for lack of a better term, and at one point I had to note that there'd been no mention of the bird for about 1/3 of the book.
I've found that a good way to give your characters distinct voices is to cast them in your mind as actors or personal acquaintances, and use those as models for their speech patterns.
Mmm. He actually gave a few of the characters distinct accents, which I realize isn't something you listed. I find that kind of distracting.
Oh, definitely. Never hurts to throw in a "Roger said" once in a while during a long, two-person dialogue, especially if something breaks the back-and-forth rhythm of the conversation. But I have edited my fair share of manuscripts where the author seemed to feel obliged to tack some sort of attribution onto every line of dialogue, even when the speaker is obvious from context.
"So, Doctor Zenon, do you believe the aliens are friendly?"
"The evidence indicates as much, captain."
In this case, we can safely assume that it's Doctor Zenon who is replying.
If it wasn't; say, if someone else just entered the room, having heard the question, and decided to answer, perhaps surprising those in the room with their sudden appearance, you could have one of the others identify who just spoke.
Or just write something like:
Before the doctor could answer, an unexpected voice intruded. "Friendly? Don't make me laugh."
Then you can identify the speaker in the next paragraph:
"Princess Gwilia strode into the chamber, armed to the teeth," etc.
This brings to mind the comic book thing where some new unidentified voice suddenly interrupts from off-panel, Our Hero (or Villain) exclaims “WHO—?!”… and the next panel dramatically reveals a familiar character whose voice Our Hero/Villain certainly ought to have recognized.
I have seen "ejaculated" as a dialogue verb in more than just Doyle.
It turns up in, for example, the Raffles stories of E.W. Hornung. From "A Trap to Catch a Cracksman," and I chose this one because of the form:
It also turns up in the writing of American humorist John Kendrick Bangs, such as his 1912 book, The Little Book of Christmas.
Even the English translations of Maurice LeBlanc's Arsene Lupin novels use the tag.
I've also read a few cases where the author lost track of who was talking in a long untagged back-and-forth and things stopped making sense, so I had to double back to figure out who accidentally answered their own question or something and see where they jumped the tracks.Oh, definitely. Never hurts to throw in a "Roger said" once in a while during a long, two-person dialogue, especially if something breaks the back-and-forth rhythm of the conversation. But I have edited my fair share of manuscripts where the author seemed to feel obliged to tack some sort of attribution onto every line of dialogue, even when the speaker is obvious from context.
"So, Doctor Zenon, do you believe the aliens are friendly?"
"The evidence indicates as much, captain."
In this case, we can safely assume that it's Doctor Zenon who is replying.
Pretty sure Robert E. Howard also employed it from time to time.
Out of curiosity, I just checked my Wodehouse ebooks. Bertram Wooster would never!
I was going to say, one reason to use speaker tags (whether "said" or a descriptive sentence mentioning the speaker) is for our own benefit as writers, so we don't lose track in just that way. It doesn't have to be every paragraph, but at least every few paragraphs. Unless the characters have distinctive enough speech patterns that they're easy to tell apart, e.g. one speaks very formally and the other in vernacular, or one is verbose and the other curt.
In Japanese, this is probably easy, because different characters use different first-person pronouns, e.g. a boy would typically call himself boku, a young man ore, an old man washi, a young woman atashi, a more formal woman watashi, a very formal woman watakushi, while small children or women acting cutesy might refer to themselves by name instead of a pronoun. There's also a thing in fiction where supremely arrogant characters will call themselves ore-sama, using the highest honorific for themselves, though I don't know if anyone does that in real life. I've seen at least one anime wiki where the information boxes on the characters' pages list what pronouns they use for themselves.
Peter David went through a phase of using "overmuch" overmuch, and then it started catching on with other Trek writers.
There's also a lot of chuckling in Star Trek novels.
Diane Carey seemed to hate "said," not because it didn't provide any emotional cues, but because she wanted to inject as much action into every scene as she could. I don't have any concrete examples at the moment, but I remember once saying that her style of presenting dialogue was often like "'Take this,' she gave." I remember a lot of said substitutes that were redundant because the dialogue already made things clear, as well as a lot of transitive verbs being used as intransitive verbs. I found it way more distracting than if the characters had just said things.
My general opinion on said and other dialogue tags, is that I just want it to be clear who's talking, and sometimes it is a good idea to give some indication of how a character is saying something. Skipping said and other tags is fine if it's just two people, but if you have more than two people talking, you really need some way to indicate who's talking.
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