BucketORandomness wrote:Merpy Christmidays! Random challenge/prompt thing. Using word choice and tone in your writing, write a scene that gives this sentence emotion:
"You don't fight well with others," she said.
A quote out of context for the greater good. My creative writing teacher absolutely hates words like announced or cried or exclaimed as a substitute for said. His reasons are that the way the person should have said it should be evident by their actions before and after, the words they used, and the tone of the scene in general. I've personally taken it as a challenge in my writing and thought I'd share something that came up in conversation today >^.^<
I like that your teacher is that way actually. As tempting as it may be to use tags to show the emotion of a sentence, it can really make a dialogue more confusing rather than clarifying the emotion. It's been proven that "said" is the best go-to because it tends to fade in the background and go unnoticed, which is something you really want a dialogue tag to do. A dialogue tag's purpose is to define who is speaking, rather than to define their emotion. I understand using the occasional "asked" if it's a question, and "replied" / "responded" but I'd stop there mostly. If course exceptions can be made and some other tags should sometimes be used but this is the main rule according to pretty much all 5 sources I've visited for help writing dialogue.
I will try to write something on this, thanks for sharing!