Life, Writing, Weirdness

Way back at the end of May 2024, I wrote a post with the title “Storytelling Devices That Bug Me, Part 1”. I clearly thought I might eventually have more to say on the subject, particularly since the six things I referenced in that post were all essentially temporal. If I were to summarize that post with a simple sentence, that sentence would be something like, “Keep your timeline consistent.”

It took me a while to circle back, but there are other things that annoy me in stories, whether they happen in prose or in other media, although I mostly think of fiction when I’m grumbling about things like this. A couple of them I’ve encountered in the last little while. For this post, I’m going to briefly hit three semi-related ones and save more for another day. Semi-related as in they’re all related to dialogue.

Number one, keeping secrets. This is not a bad thing on its own. Good storytelling very often requires keeping secrets from your reader, sometimes revealing those secrets a bit at a time to lead the reader engaged with the plot and characters, sometimes to be revealed in unexpected surprises that still fit with the story and the people populating it. Again, keeping secrets from the reader isn’t a bad thing by itself, but the way it’s presented can be. If the POV character learns something on screen, the reader should learn it to. Or if that POV tells the character something else, the reader should get to “hear” it, too. It’s really, really irritating to run across a (hopefully better written) sentence like, “Bob sketched out the details of the plan and I agreed.” Or worse, “She asked me what I planned to do and I told her.” If the author doesn’t want me to know what the plan is, the scene break should come before that sentence, and we can pick up the action with the plan in progress and action happening.

Number two: dialogue tags are a lost opportunity. Things like he said, they said, I said are practically invisible as you’re reading. But if they’re practically invisible, why are we wasting pixels on them, much less printed words? Make them completely invisible instead. Oh, they can be switched up with more active verbs. Bob hissed. Sanjit yelled. Amina lied. These aren’t really any better and may not even tell the reader if there should be a particular inflection in the speech. In my own writing, I almost never use dialogue tags. They’re an easy shorthand that ultimately adds nothing to the writing. Even if they appear in the prose during the first brain dump of a story demanding to be let out of my skull, they rarely survive past that first draft. Why would I use them when I could attach a short (or long) sentence of descriptive action to further build the character, scene, or world? Sometimes, those descriptive actions can give all three. Unless the conversation is actually taking place between two disembodied brains, there is body language to be explored and scenery to exist in. And even if it does take place between two disembodied brains, there are other questions that can be answered with bits of description between the dialogue. Plus, every character is different and might pick slightly different words to say the same thing. Putting everything together, the reader shouldn’t need tags to know who’s speaking.

Number three: dialects in dialogue. Unless the objective is to draw all the attention to a particular character or the primary audience for a story is the speakers of that dialogue, this just serves to make the writing harder to read. It’s not verisimilitude, it’s making the reader work harder than they need to in order to understand the interactions between that character and anyone else. Describe the accent, use it a bit initially, and then drop hints here and there. The other characters get used to it because they’d be interacting with the character who speaks differently, but that doesn’t mean the reader will. A better use for a character who speaks in a significant dialect the author wants to show of is to draw attention to a single moment in time, a character who plays a small but pivotal role in the plot and is probably never seen again in a major way.

Reminder: everything I put in a post like this is an opinion. Note the title, “Things that Bug Me in Fiction”, emphasis should be put on the “me”. Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy. Just because something bothers me doesn’t mean it will bother someone else.

And if I work at it, I’m sure I can find something I enjoy that breaks every one of these, but it will be an exception rather than the rule. The dialect “rule”, for example, is rather firmly broken for me by Alex Kilgour in the SF series Sten, for example. I enjoy Alex when he’s on screen and he’s on screen frequently. He’s not the hero and does tend to monopolize the conversation when he’s involved in it, distracting from what the other characters are doing, and a lot of the time it may be intentional. But he is an exception.

Be well, everyone.