Tags: dialogue, said, asked, excerptQuick-Ref, Final Edit, Word edition

[Excerpted from Final Edit, the Final Hours of Your Final Draft. This section “Tips for Scrivener Users” is from Chapter Eleven and first appeared in the second printing of the book.]

Scrivener is a program developed by Literature and Latte specifically for writers. See the links to various versions of the program in Appendix I “Link List”: links to the educational version at bit.ly/Scrivener-ed, the Macintosh version by way of bit.ly/Scrivener-Mac, and the Windows version by way of bit.ly/Scrivener-Win.
A common scenario among writers who use Scrivener is to write their books in Scrivener and then compile the manuscript into a file that can be brought into Word for its Final Edit. That is precisely how this book was written.
Having just touched upon the subject of how to “Use Find and Replace to Automate Style Assignment,” I feel it is important to provide those readers who use Scrivener with some tips to leverage Scriveners “presets” so that the resulting compiled document can undergo automatic style assignment in Word.
The easiest way to do this is to make all your Scrivener presets unique in font size, font family, or both. Let’s use font size as an example. In Scrivener (before compiling) assign a unique size to some text in each preset and then use Format Formatting Redefine Preset From Selection to assign that size to all occurrences of that preset.
Having done this, now you can use Word’s Find & Replace box to convert everything of a specified font size to a designated Word style. Under the Find & Replace box’s “Format” menu choose “Font…” then, with the cursor in the empty “Find what” field, specify the font size of a particular preset. Move the cursor to the “Replace with” field and choose the appropriate style from the “Style…” item at the bottom of the “Format” menu. Again, the field will be empty. Now press the “Replace All” button and everything of the chosen font size will be assigned to the same Word style.
It’s a good idea keep the same font size that was used to identify the Scrivener preset as the font size of the destination Word style. After you have converted all your Scrivener presets to Word styles in this manner, it’s a simple task to change the font sizes of the Word styles to whatever you prefer.

[Excerpted from Final Edit, the Final Hours of Your Final Draft.]

A popular misconception among writers is that one should avoid “said” as much as possible and, in its place, substitute any sound-related term imaginable, the more obscure, the more desirable. I have seen novels in which the author did not use “said” even once because of this misconception, to the detriment of the work. Because I work in the field of computational linguistics using the corpus of bestselling novels for my research, I can state with certainty that this does not occur in books by bestselling authors.

To promote either of these misconceptions is tantamount to a music teacher promoting the notion that a performance should include wrong notes “in order to distinguish one’s performance from that of others performing the same work,” and the more wrong notes, the merrier!

The truth of the matter is that 80% or more of your attributions should use the verbs “said” or “asked.” “Said” is always invisible to the reader and “asked” shares that characteristic in most cases. The remaining 20% of attributions should be distributed among words that can actually refer to human speech! In other words, you cannot say, “she grinned” or “she grimaced” in place of “she said” because grinning and grimacing cannot produce human words.

Use “said” more than all the other attributions combined: at least twice as often as “asked” (2.33 times as many is a good ratio). The complete list of acceptable attributions follows, in order of preference by frequency of usage by bestselling authors (determined by FictionFixer).

NORMAL: said, asked

EXOTIC: insisted, shouted, answered, whispered, gasped, explained, demanded, cried, responded, lied, observed, murmured, stuttered, mumbled, snarled, screamed, protested, muttered, hissed, yelled, replied, groaned, begged, added, declared, confessed, railed, pleaded, conceded, whined, pointed out, and “signed” (if a character uses sign language)

You will notice that every verb on the list can actually refer to the act of human speech. In this text, we will use the term “exotic” to refer to all attribution verbs that are not “said” or “asked.”

You may be wondering why “thought” is not on this list. Do not consider “thought” to be a dialogue attribution verb, rather, it is a thought attribution verb (like pondered, contemplated, reflected, speculated, and imagined). Thoughts may, in rare instances, require attributions, but the thoughts, themselves, are usually not placed in quotes. Thoughts may be in italics or not, but italicized “thoughts” do not require an attribution verb.

[…]

Here is the missing part of the puzzle. Attributions should be required in only 25% of your dialogue blocks. Note the term “dialogue blocks” in the previous sentence does not mean dialogue sentences. A dialogue block represents any number of dialogue sentences, as little as one, or as many as you like.

Professional writers manage to leave about 75% of all dialogue blocks without attributions because they take great care in structuring their dialogue so the reader always knows who is speaking. You can accomplish this by indicating the speaker in the first two dialogue paragraphs, and then letting the reader assume that the two speakers alternate until another attribution indicates otherwise or until non-dialogue text is encountered.

[…]

We know that the best ratio between normal attribution verbs and exotic attribution verbs is 80% to 20%. So, if only around 25% of our dialogue blocks should have attributions, and 80% of those should be normal attributions, then 20% of your dialogue blocks should have the normal attribution verbs, “said” and “asked.” The remaining approximately 5% of your attribution verbs can be drawn from the exotic pool.