Hiss boom bah

Several weeks ago I wrote about the dangers of mismatching verbs with the action they’re meant to describe, like the needle of a syringe “digging” into an arm or a rocket propelled grenade “poking” through the door of a Humvee. This danger is especially pronounced with dialogue tags. 

Yesterday I started reading a new novel about a British tank crew in Normandy during World War II. It’s already very good—I hope to have more to say about it here at the end of the year—but this morning I read the following, the response of the tank commander to his crew’s nervous chatter as they prepare to attack a German position:

“Pipe down,” James hissed. “Driver, advance.”

It’s not too pedantic to point out that the phrase “Pipe down,” with its plosives and open-mouthed vowel sounds, is physically impossible to “hiss.” 

What the author is trying to capture here is a tone: the terse, tense order of a commander in a dangerous situation. James is just as nervy as his men. But the strongly onomatopoeic hiss suggests a sound other than what we, in our minds, have already heard him say. Hiss might have worked for “Shut up” or “Hush” or “Shhh!” but not this.

The author might have considered a verb that would have more closely matched the dialogue while still conveying the tone he wanted. Bark is the classic example—as in “barking orders”—but is also too close to a cliché to recommend itself. It also suggests shouting, which James is manifestly not doing. It hasn’t reached that point yet.

Elmore Leonard offers the simplest way out of this conundrum. Among the items in his personal decalogue of writing advice is:

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

I agree with this rule probably 98% of the time, because it works. Leonard always preferred to convey tone through what was said rather than describing, secondhand, how it was said. When a writer does this deliberately, it can help make his dialogue better. Relying solely on said removes a potential crutch that can lead to bad writing and gradually renders the dialogue tags invisible, concentrating the reader’s attention on the dialogue itself.

Some writers choose to drop dialogue tags entirely. I admire that kind of artistic constraint but think that’s going too far. Removing the tags means relying on description and stage directions to indicate the speaker in any conversation involving more than two people. Even a writer who is good at this, like Craig Johnson, who uses no dialogue tags in his Longmire mysteries, eventually strains for ways to indicate the speaker. He said is simple and almost invisible, and doesn’t break up the rhythm of the talk itself.

The irony is that said would have worked perfectly well in the above example. “Pipe down,” in the context in which it’s said and coming from the character who says it, conveys the right tone all by itself.

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Looking forward to more of this novel. I’m getting new tires this afternoon, so I should have plenty of time with it. In the meantime, I’ve decided I should resurrect my old series of scholastic commentaries on Leonard’s rules. The last post I wrote concerned regional dialect. I think the next should concern dialogue tags—and adverbs, the subject of rule #4. For the complete list of Leonard’s rules, see this post from the early days of the blog, in which I compare his with similar rules from Orwell and CS Lewis.