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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve no idea about accessibility in general, but that’s not the best advice for a newly aspiring author, much less the senior one.

    If you’re new and trying to do two pages of dialogue in your first love story, it can be really easy to repeat the word ‘said’ fifty times in the first page. Spice it up with an extra ‘exclaimed’ or if you’re feeling funny, an extra ‘ejaculated’. Or at least, that’s how that advice goes. The problem with it is that ‘said’ is an invisible word, particularly in stories with dialogue. You might as well try to avoid using ‘the’ in your sentences. Better authors will have characters with individual voices and can skip the ‘person said’ altogether, since the reader will be easily able to distinguish the characters based on the context and the words being said.

    For short stuff, keep ‘said’ in. You can have multiple people saying several things in order before it even becomes something you as the author get tired of, much less the audience who won’t read the story more than once anyways. Bare minimum, every character needs a ‘said character b’ done at least twice per scene. People (me) forget who’s talking unless your name is Brian Jacques and you can give every character their own actually well thought out accent. For conversations longer than a couple pages, consider using the occasional alternative descriptor, and also not using any at all.

    Don’t avoid ‘said’. You need it to be legible. Just, consider using it slightly less if you have a shitton of talking to describe.