Guest Post: Dialogue Attribution in Prose – An Opinion or Two... by Thomas B. Sawyer

Please welcome author Tom Sawyer back to the blog today.

Dialogue Attribution in Prose – An Opinion or Two...

By Thomas B. Sawyer

Coming to narrative fiction somewhat in reverse from most writers – in that I began as a screenwriter – afforded me more than a few attitudes. And definitely not least was/is on the topic of dialogue attribution.

In novels and short stories I had long been struck by what I see as the rampant, mindless use of “he said,” “she said,” “said he” and the like. I know that many highly regarded and/or successful writers and teachers believe such usage as a kind of pinnacle of simplicity. I agree, but not in the affirmative sense of “simple.”

As I began to contemplate my first venture into the form, I started to question such things more actively. Why, I wondered, would experienced, quality writers who otherwise (rightly) bust their humps to avoid repetitions and the use of clichés, surrender to these without guilt? Or, viewed another way, when does a particular phrase cease being “economical,” and morph into a mindless cliché?

And how many millions of trees, I asked myself, have given their lives for such conceits?

To me, even worse – no, make that dumber – is “she/he asked.” It’s dumber because, since it so often follows a question mark, the reader knows it’s a question, right? So why repeat it?

And then there are “he blurted,” “she exclaimed,” “he queried,” etc. If you must attribute, rather than committing those atrocities, I guess “he said” begins to look attractive.

Almost. 

Did I have a solution? Yeah. When I prepared to write my first novel, THE SIXTEENTH MAN, I set as a goal/challenge for myself – a little secret bar-raising pact, if you will – that I would never use any of those phrases. Ever. And I never have.

The result? While hardly revolutionary – I’ve since learned that numerous novelists do it – I’m convinced that it has made my writing better, more readable, and certainly more visual.

Here’s my approach, and the way I teach it.

Work on attribution the way you work on the rest of your writing, with the care you give to your dialogue and your descriptions. Will it make a dramatic difference to your readers? Not likely. Will they even be aware of it? Probably not. But – will it make a difference to you as a writer? Emphatically, yes. It’ll force you to think. To challenge yourself about stuff from which most narrative writers take the day off. So that all of your writing will become fresher. And importantly, more visual about stuff that really matters: your story’s drama.

And for me, in the process, I found that it contributed to finding my “voice.”

It also contributed to some criticism from certain literary types who warned me that as a novelist I could not “write for the camera.” I submit that they are mistaken. The reader is the camera. The reader is seeing the pictures. Imagining the scene.

Think about conventional, by-the-numbers dialogue attribution for a moment. “She said,” does almost nothing to help the reader envision the scene. It says nothing about the body-language of the speaker, or her inflection. Where were her hands? Was her head cocked to one side? Did she, during the speech, touch her face, or the person to whom she spoke? For me, settling for “said” implies that the speaker is delivering lines with arms hanging at his/her side. Again, for me as a reader, a brief description of body-language counts for a helluvva lot more than knowing what the person is wearing, or hair-color, or the texture of sofa-upholstery.

Or merely, identifying the character who is speaking.

Admittedly, noting such detail isn’t always important, but when it helps the reader “see” the action, it seems to follow that it will also help the reader “hear” the words.

In my own case, as with most-but-not-all writers, when it’s obviously clear for the reader which character is speaking, I omit attribution. But when the speaker is gesturing to emphasize a point, or is revealing, say, insecurity or anger or even an emotion that contradicts his or her words, that is worth communicating to my audience. Further, when a character’s response to another’s words isn’t spoken, but is rather a gesture, or a look, that can be good storytelling. And effective theater.

I think of it as directing my actors – just as in my scriptwriting, describing when necessary those actions that augment their speeches – or – as in non-verbal responses – replace them entirely.

I urge any writer to try it. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Tom Sawyer ©2019

Edgar & Emmy-nominated, Tom Sawyer was Head Writer/Showrunner of the classic CBS series, MURDER, SHE WROTE, for which he wrote 24 episodes. Tom sold, then wrote 9 series pilots, was Head Writer/Showrunner or Producer on 15 network series. Tom wrote/directed/produced the feature-film comedy, ALICE GOODBODY. He is co-librettist/lyricist ofJACK, an opera about JFK which has been performed to acclaim in the US and Europe. Tom authored bestselling mystery/thrillers THE SIXTEENTH MAN, & NO PLACE TO RUN. His latest, a mystery/thriller-with-humor: A MAJORPRODUCTION!, 2nd in a series featuring NY PI Barney Moon, who doesn’t drive, sees  LA as an Alien Planet, and is stuckthere. www.thomasbsawyer.com

Barry Ergang Reviews: A MAJOR PRODUCTION! (2018) by Thomas B. Sawyer

A MAJOR PRODUCTION! (2018) by Thomas B. Sawyer

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

New Yorker Barney Moon, private investigator, hates Los Angeles, a city for which he has a number of unflattering appellations including “Whackoville,” “Tinselburg,” and “Goofyland.” But after clearing up a case for a client of the Eller Insurance agency, one involving a corrupt judge and an incriminating file labeled Stuff, Barney gets a phone call from his old friend Saul Flockman. A hedge fund manager, he and Barney exist “in distant worlds, largely out of touch except for several instances of Saul’s personal stress during which he had hired Barney for domestic surveillance.” Saul constantly worries that his actress wife Wanda Gooden is playing around on him, and has on three prior occasions hired Barney to check up on her. Barney has yet to catch her “in anything even approaching compromise or lying.”

Now Saul wants to hire Barney again, and for the same purpose. One of Saul’s clients, Hollywood agent Irwin Kerner, has told Saul that if he—Saul—invested half a million dollars in an independent film production, Kerner could get Wanda a good role. The production company is Ganell Films, about which Kerner has been unable to find any information. Wanda has gone to L.A. to try to learn why her part hasn’t yet happened.

Saul explains that over time, Kerner has come to owe him over a million dollars—money he paid the agent to help along Wanda’s career. He suspects Kerner has gambled it away at “casinos and the like.” But as much as he needs to recoup his losses to Kerner, Saul needs to know if Wanda has been cheating on him with the agent. He also knows Barney hates L.A., and is willing to double the usual fee plus a bonus, also figuring the job will be a quickie: “red-eye out, red-eye back.”

Barney feels for his friend, but also “knew himself. That no matter how simple his cases were, there was almost invariably something else that would catch his eye—and his curiosity…a kind of a fatal flaw.” But because both Saul and Wanda are friends, he curses and takes a flight to Los Angeles.

Having grown up and lived most of his life in New York City, Barney has never learned to drive. Thus, he must avail himself of the services of the lovely Melodie Seaver, whom he’s known from a prior visit to L.A. With her chauffeuring, he stakes out Kerner’s home, then Kerner at a Rodeo Drive restaurant with Wanda, and later Kerner’s office. At the latter he observes an attractive woman who emerges and burns some papers, after which he goes inside to case the office himself and rifle it for some evidence for his friend and client, Saul Flockman.

When he cautiously returns to the car, police vehicles and sirens having pierced the vicinity, Melodie tells him she witnessed the shooting death of the woman whom Barney had earlier seen outside of Kerner’s office.

What ultimately ensues and keeps Barney an unhappy professional captive in Cloud- Cockamamie-Land, in part because of his aforementioned fatal flaw, is his inadvertent embroilment in situations that involve, among others, the mechanically-skilled brothers Cory and Pete Bilchek; drug dealer and money-launderer Renaldo Esteban and his crew; fledgling screenwriter Jonah Whiting, and Homeland Security Agents Vincent Rogers and George Lippet—all while trying to solve the murder of Phyllis Carridi, wife of powerful mob boss Angelo Carridi. Caught between Carridi and the cops and D.A., and up against a literal deadline, Barney will need all of his wits to figure out everything that’s going on in this entertaining rapid-fire amalgam of thriller, whodunit, and screwball comedy.

The version I read was a digital advanced reading copy which contains some typos and other errors, the biggest problem being a plethora of incorrect punctuations. I hope and assume an editor/proofreader corrected them in the paperback and electronic final editions.

© 2018 Barry Ergang

Some of Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

Guest Post: The Black Bird and the Chicago Kid by Thomas B. Sawyer

Back in June for FFB here on the blog, Barry Ergang reviewed The Sixteenth Man by Thomas B. Sawyer. One thing led to another and for this first this first Saturday in September, please welcome author Thomas B. Sawyer to the blog today…

The Black Bird and the Chicago Kid

By
Thomas B. Sawyer

Funny how stuff can sneak up on you. I was a youth when I first read Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and therefore didn’t really understand its significant place in American literature. Nor did I have any notion of how deeply and pervasively it would affect my life and my professional career. Only now, upon reflection, have I become fully aware of this last.

On one level, I simply enjoyed the hell out of the book. But some things about the story grabbed me in a special way – not least Hammett’s account of the Black Bird’s history, part fact, part fiction, that greatly heightened the romance of the fictional story – the possibility that the McGuffin everyone in the book was pursuing still existed somewhere in the real world. The mixing of a dollop (or maybe more?) of fact with fiction. Exciting stuff for a thirteen year-old, growing up in Chicago’s not-very-exciting South Side. How much was real, and how much was Hammett’s creation?

             That question, plus Hammett’s vivid cast of characters and his terse, unembellished style hooked me enough that I re-read the novel. Over and over, at yearly or semi-yearly intervals. By age 20, I had read it at least eight times. And discovered something new each time. It never disappointed.

Along the way, I read a lot of other books, including Hammett’s competition in the mystery genre, both old and new. And it gradually hit me that in many ways, Falcon differed from virtually all the mystery and detective fiction that had gone before – dramatically breaking the patterns set by Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and Agatha Christie (Miss Marple & Hercule Poirot, among others). It also became apparent that most of the mystery fiction written since was largely derivative-if-not-downright-imitative of The Maltese Falcon, with very very little even close to equaling it. Of course there has been, and continues to be, some terrific writing done in the genre, but for me, while Raymond Chandler’s wonderful, literate Philip Marlowe novels came nearest, along with some newer contributions by Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake, Falcon has never been surpassed.

One of the ways Hammett’s paradigm novel was so singular was that while it contained a murder mystery – Who killed Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer? (three murders, actually, the others being those of Captain Jacoby of the SS La Paloma, and tough guy Floyd Thursby) – it was surprisingly, for its time – and even today, a detective story that was not about clues or suspects. Another difference was that the tale took the reader on such a fascinating, entertaining journey through rascal-and-double-cross country that one almost forgot the murder mystery part of it.

In the end, Hammett delivered satisfying closure in the matter of Archer’s killer (and Jacoby’s and Thursby’s), but in truth we almost didn’t care, the rest of it being so thoroughly gripping, introducing us to such a variety of wonderful, skewed characters – especially his enigmatic hero, private eye Sam Spade, and the lying, seductive Brigid O’Shaughnessy, who was to become the model female antagonist of novels and films noir for decades. The superb, classic movie version of The Maltese Falcon (Scr. & Dir. John Huston) is, by the way, almost scene-for-scene and word-for-word, Hammett’s book.

When I was invited to write for the Murder, She Wrote TV series (Cr. William Link & Richard Levinson and Peter Fischer) before it went on the air, I was immediately thrilled by the prospect of writing for one of the world’s truly great actresses, Angela Lansbury. I asked Peter what kind of stories he planned to do. His response, delivered with a shrug: “I dunno – sort of youknow Agatha Christie puzzle mysteries.”

I pointed out to Peter that as a boy I had read a few Christies, plus a couple of locked-room mysteries by others, wherein the suspects were invariably gathered at the end in “the drawing room” or its equivalent, and they had bored the hell out of me. “I won’t write that kind of stuff.”

“Okay – so what will you write?”

“I’ll write The Maltese Falcon.”

Peter’s reply – without missing a beat – was “That’ll be fine.”

The cool thing – he knew exactly what I meant. And that’s what I wrote for the next twelve years, coming to realize that that approach was probably my signal contribution to the series – in effect a weekly play about a bunch of fascinating characters in conflict – in which a murder invariably happened.

Without my becoming conscious of it for decades, Dashiell Hammett and The Maltese Falcon have profoundly influenced all of my writing, both pre-Murder, She Wrote, and since. Has my storytelling been shaped by other writers, other books? Of course. But I love having come to a fuller understanding of and appreciation for The Black Bird’s place in my life. It has always been for me, and still is, the Gold Standard.

© 2017 Tom Sawyer Productions, Inc.

Tom Sawyer, Emmy & Edgar-nominated, Head Writer/Showrunner/Producer, classic series, Murder, She Wrote, for which he wrote 24 episodes. Tom’s new bestselling memoir: The Adventures of the REAL Tom Sawyer. Authored bestselling Fiction Writing Demystified. Bestselling thrillers: The Sixteenth Man, No Place to Run, Cross Purposes. Sold/wrote 9 TV series pilots, 100+ scripts. Co-librettist/lyricist: JACK, an opera about JFK. www.ThomasBSawyer.com

 

FFB Review: THE SIXTEENTH MAN (2000) by Thomas B. Sawyer -- Reviewed by Barry Ergang

For this final Friday in June, Barry Ergang is back with another review for Friday’s Forgotten Books. Today he reviews The Sixteenth Man by Thomas B. Sawyer. After you read Barry’s review, head over to Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom blog for the full list of suggestions.

THE SIXTEENTH MAN (2000) by Thomas B. Sawyer

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

If and when you decide to acquire a copy of this novel, I urge you to avoid reading the lengthy synopses at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and probably elsewhere, lest they spoil some of the tense and pleasurable surprises you’ll encounter by reading the actual story.  

A mystery thriller featuring two timelines which ultimately converge, The Sixteenth Man opens in the present with archaeologist Dr. Matthew Packard nearly killing himself in a motorcycle accident in Moab, Utah, where he and his crew are on a dig. The accident results in his discovery of an ancient burial site containing the bones of sixteen skeletons, fifteen of which are possibly a hundred thousand years-old, and one of which still has some hairs attached and silver fillings in its teeth—and a bullet in its forearm, rendering its demise far more modern. When one of his crew is seriously injured and another murdered, Packard realizes he’s stumbled onto something of archaeological, historical, and—possibly—criminal significance. Now if he can only live long enough to uncover who and why….

In November of 1963, private investigator Charlie Callan, a man whose own personal and professional issues are in a state of chaos, is contracted by a wealthy friend to obtain evidence supporting his wife’s blatant infidelity. Charlie tails the woman and her lover from Nevada to Texas, and it’s there that he stumbles into trouble that includes a murder charge, a murderous conspiracy at the highest level of government (note the time of this part of the story at this paragraph’s beginning), and an opportunity to make a great deal of money for those he loves despite the likelihood that he’ll be killed no matter what.  

Beyond mentioning that the way these two storylines play out and come together will keep readers turning pages as they get to know some intriguing characters, their backgrounds and relationships to others, lethal and otherwise, in a terrific page-turner, I don’t want to say anything  more lest I spoil the fun and excitement.

Except to say: read it—unless those doing so find graphic language and some sexuality disturbing or outright offensive. 

While non-prudish 21st Century readers are at it, they should check out author Thomas B. Sawyer’s qualifications—http://www.thomasbsawyer.com/—where it should become immediately apparent that the man knows how to tell—and what drives—a compelling story. 

Recommended!

© 2017 Barry Ergang

Some of Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work is available at Amazon and at Smashwords.com