"Damn," he hissed.

Years ago, I wrote a semi-regular column for Dean Wesley Smith's most-excellent writing fanzine, The Report, and the title of that column was "Old Enough to Know Better," which is where this blog's title came from. In those articles, I tended to offer writing advice regarding those things I found particularly grating, and following on the heels of the most recent post regarding redundant body part function, I shall today address another pet peeve:

1) Said-bookisms.

Said-bookisms, simply put, are words used instead of "said" when attributing dialog.
One can get away with these now and then, think of them as really hot pepper, but too many mark you as an amateur and will burn your reader, and you should view them as if each time you used one, you had to pull a hundred bucks from your pocket and give it to the nearest passerby.

"Said" tends to disappear when you write it: "Well," he said, "I believe that is true."
"I agree," she said.

Sometimes "asked" will work, especially if the sentence ends in a question mark. Or "allowed." Or a few others that slip quietly into the line without calling attention to themselves.

After a while, people tune these out. But in an effort to spice up one's dialog, beginners often replace said with other words that they believe to be more exciting. People start hissing, spitting, moaning, laughing, whispering, groaning, and when those don't seem interesting enough, the adverbs come out, and they "hiss excitedly" or "spit angrily" or "moan enthusiastically." These sub-said-bookisms are sometimes called Swifties, after the Tom Swift books, which were chock full of such things.

No shit? Tom asked constipatedly ...

Do NOT do this. It is wrong. It marks you as somebody who doesn't know better. It will get your story rejected by the third or fourth one, unless the first one is really bad, and that will be enough.

If you want to say she laughed, try this way: "Funny," she said. She laughed. Don't say, "Funny," she laughed. because she didn't. Try saying "funny" and laughing at the same time. Probably you'll feel stupid, and that's okay, because you will sound stupid.

You say words. If you must qualify them, add a line: Really?" he said. His voice was full of pain, as he thought of all the rewriting he would have to do. This is much better than: Really?" he rasped painfully ...

Now and again, people can whisper something, but much better this way: "I didn't know that, truly." Her voice was a whisper, barely audible even three feet away.

One can have great fun with the line "Look out!" Conan ejaculated. with but a little punctuation.

Harlan Ellison, quoting, I think, Damon Knight, offered up a wonderful example of inappropriate said-bookism's once: "Good morning," he pole-vaulted.

(And you might try hissing the word "damn" sometime. No sibilants. You can't do it. That particular example comes from a story I wrote and had published early in my career, with an editor who let it pass, either out of ignorance -- or maybe spite ...)

Trust me here. Leave that thesaurus on the shelf and use said, and when you can get away with it, if you've established distinct character voices, you can drop that, too.

"Really?"

"Yeah, no shit."