{"id":739,"date":"2016-01-25T21:40:02","date_gmt":"2016-01-26T05:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/?p=739"},"modified":"2016-01-25T21:51:11","modified_gmt":"2016-01-26T05:51:11","slug":"said-he-snorted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/said-he-snorted\/","title":{"rendered":"“Said”, He Snorted."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MythBashers<\/a>Yesterday I saw one of those current fonts of irrefutable wisdom, a FaceBook meme, saying not to have characters snorting in laughing or sneering out their lines. You know what I mean. Trouble is, does the person who created that meme?<\/p>\n

The idea that you can\u2019t use action to tag or bracket dialogue is pretty stupid and petty, but not that extreme as lame writing advice goes on occasion. You see people telling you that you can\u2019t use ANY speech tag other than \u201csaid\u201d. I await somebody telling you not to use even that.<\/p>\n

This is a good example of exactly what I am talking about when I tell you to ignore all this static. I get a personal sense of irony when some of the same people who go ballistic when I say that writing has very little technique\u2026 then make a career out of telling you anything you might use that even looks like a technique to them is taboo.<\/p>\n

They are telling you that there is something wrong with a line like \u201cYeah, right,\u201d she snorted. Insecure newbies don\u2019t question that. And start passing that dumb advice on in their own posts and blogs. I\u2019m giving you credit for having the ability to ask, \u201cHey, yeah, what\u2019s wrong with that line?\u201d (Snorting that question is optional.)<\/p>\n

And the thing is, it\u2019s pretty damned hard to find a reason that line should be abolished and shunned. It\u2019s an act of faith, actually. Unquestioning acceptance of dogma. Which is not mentioned in any English grammar text in the world\u2026 just cooked up by that tribe of writers with no sales who tell you what not to do.\u00a0\u00a0 Sure, if you ask you\u2019ll get some of the standard nonsense like \u201cIt\u2019s lazy writing\u201d or \u201cIt draws the reader out of the book\u201d\u2014non-answers that just beg the question off to other faith-based nonsense. In point of actual fact, there is no reason not to use that kind of tag, and anybody who can\u2019t figure that out on their own can quickly find examples of it in successful published books, probably by their favorite authors.\u00a0\u00a0 Telling writers to only use \u201csaid\u201d or even to stick to tags that aren\u2019t\u2026 whatever \u201csnorted\u201d is\u2026 is like telling painters to use only blue in their paintings.<\/p>\n

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Yesterday I saw one of those current fonts of irrefutable wisdom, a FaceBook meme, saying not to have characters snorting in laughing or sneering out their lines. You know what I mean. Trouble is, does the person who created that meme? The idea that you can\u2019t use action to tag or bracket dialogue is pretty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":740,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":744,"href":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions\/744"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/linrobinson.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}