Welcome to the first of four Stupid Advice Saturdays, where I debunk ridiculously common but also ridiculously misguided writing advice that you should absolutely under no circumstances listen to. Or at the very least, take with the most massive grain of salt you can possibly find. First on our list we have one of the prime culprits from the Stupid Writing Advice Hall of Fame: Said Is Dead.

If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard this one before, first of all, can I join you there? It sounds nice. Basically, “said is dead” is a silly, silly argument that you should not use the word “said” because it’s… wait for it… a common way of tagging dialogue.

That’s it; that’s the argument.

That we shouldn’t use a word because the word is a common word in our language.

If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like an argument at all, it sounds like idiocy, you’d be entirely right. Firstly, this is because the choice of what dialogue tags to use is a stylistic choice, and meaning that it is subjective. And any time you hear someone trying to inflict objective judgement on a subjective element of your creative process, you can immediately dismiss it as hogwash.

So that’s one reason. I’ve got a lot more.

My second reason is that dialogue tags are an element of writing that tends to be invisible. What I mean by this is that the reader’s eyes will skim over it, absorbing the meaning but not lingering or catching on it at all. Dialogue tags serve a structural function in the sentence rather than an artistic one, like articles and prepositions. (These structural words, by the way, are usually the most common words in any language. And I don’t see anyone flying into hysterics over the use of “the,” “and,” or “in,” do you? It’s almost as if commonality is a bad reason to ban a word…) The reason to use a dialogue tag other than “said” is if you want to draw attention to the way something is being said. Maybe it’s a big emotional moment, or it’s important to point out that something is being whispered or shouted or said with a specific inflection. If you need this information to make sense of a scene, it makes sense to delve into more detail than “said.” However, in most dialogue scenes, you want the words that aren’t characters speaking to fade into the background, allowing the dialogue to fill up all the empty space with characterization and feeling and life. In those situations, you want to use a word readers come pre-programmed not to notice. A word their brain quietly absorbs without getting hung up on it or slowing down to process it. A word they’ll swallow without chewing.

You want the word “said,” and trust me, your readers do too.

In fact, it’s really, really unusual for a reader to get hung up on the word “said.” You actually almost never hear this advice from readers who don’t also write, and you never hear it from those people in their capacity as readers. You don’t hear people saying things like, “God, it’s just so annoying how often this author uses ‘said.’ I wish she’d say ‘ejaculated’ instead.” (Side note: please do not use that as a dialogue tag. People do. It is my opinion that they should not.) Instead, what you hear is, “You shouldn’t use ‘said’ because it’s uncreative/makes you sound like you have a bad vocabulary/doesn’t make your writing stand out.” The excuses, in short, tend to be very writer-centric, having only to do with how the person dolling out this advice views themselves, and how they believe you should view yourself in turn. These are the same people who pride themselves on silly things like never using the word “very,” because they think it paints them as the author in an unintellectual light. And it’s true, there are some situations in which words like “very” or “said” wouldn’t quite fit. Consider the following examples:

• He was very tired. “I’m going to bed,” he said.
• He felt exhausted. “I’m going to bed,” he yawned.

Notice how these two examples do not sound the same. The words chosen, especially when used in combination, carry not only different stylistic flavors but different connotations. The character in the second example sounds truly and honestly exhausted. Every single word is carefully selected to drip that exhaustion, tangibly and actively. But the guy in the first example sounds totally different. The first example has a dryness to it, as if the character is more exasperated or annoyed than sleepy. We can see from these examples that “very tired” doesn’t necessarily mean “exhausted,” and that “said” doesn’t feel anything like “yawned.” So why should you blindly swap the former out for the latter, without considering these undercurrents of meaning?

You shouldn’t, because said is not dead.

“Happy writing,” she said. She was very, very tired.