He said; She said – the case for ‘said’

A recent post on Tumblr very helpfully gave a great selection of verbs that could be used in place of ‘said’ when writing dialogue. It’s a useful list – and it’s always nice to expand your vocabulary – but I think its premise is flawed. There is nothing wrong with using ‘said’ in your stories.

Creating Character Voice, Part 3: Revealing Story through Voice

Part 1: Making Voices Distinctive Part 2: Accents and Dialect Now that we’ve covered some basic on making your characters sound like individuals, let’s move onto some of the fun stuff – using the voices of your characters to demonstrate relationships and reveal (or conceal) elements of the story! When should your characters sound alike?

Creating Character Voice, Part 2: Accents and dialect

See Part 1: Making voices distinctive Writing distinctive character voices sometimes means writing people who have accents. This is an area of writing fraught with challenge, because it’s so easy to overdo the dialect – and to fall into stereotyped phrases and representations. PG Wodehouse always writes dialect and accent hilariously, even if he is

Creating Character Voice, Part 1: Making voices distinctive

Part one of a three-part examination on how to create character voices in your writing.