And You Attribute That to What?
- Scott Archer Jones
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
Having been boiled in John Gardners’ books The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist, I’m fully in on attribution being subtle and near-invisible to the reader. Consider:
He said, “I am outraged.” versus
He cried in a strident far-reaching shriek, “I am outraged.”
A lot easier to go purple-prose with bad attribution. A lot easier to clutter the page with semaphores to instruct the reader how to interpret the tone and delivery of the dialogue. There are better ways to set the volume on your microphone.
But placement of attribution is a thing also. If attribution comes before the dialogue, then it tells you then and there who is speaking. Consider a room of six people talking, one after the other or on top of each other. We get the line:
“I never thought it true that field mice were stupid. They’ve always been able to burrow into what we wanted to preserve and they wanted to eat.” versus
Jerome said, “I never thought it true that field mice were stupid. They’ve always been able to burrow into what we wanted to preserve and they wanted to eat.”
Two words removes all doubt, and “said” doesn’t cloud any emotional context.
Is there a reason to put the attribution at the end of the dialogue?
“I never thought it true that field mice were stupid. They’ve always been able to burrow into what we wanted to preserve and they wanted to eat,” Jerome said.
Yes, but not normally for the reader’s clarity but for the author’s style. If you are trying to be stylish, you are succeeding. If you are trying to stay out of the way of the story, you have failed.
Is a reason to put the attribution in the middle of the dialogue?
“I never thought it true that field mice were stupid,” Jerome said. “They’ve always been able to burrow into what we wanted to preserve and they wanted to eat.”
Yes. The subtle impact on the reader is a rhythmic beat, a pause between the first statement and the second. Portraying rhythm is one of the difficulties of lyric creative writing. It’s often accomplished by sprinkling in commas where you want the reader to have a half-breath, but these can conflict with the normal commas of formal grammar. Authors often result to jamming two sentences together with the comma, when the attribution or a semicolon make more sense.
“I never thought it true that field mice were stupid, they’ve always been able to burrow into what we wanted to preserve and they wanted to eat.” This is clearly failing the scan test.
So indeed, shift your attributions to create a rhythm.
PS: We’ll finish our autopsy of prize-winning books’ titles in weeks to come.
I wrote my sentence three ways and like this version best.
"I read it twice," I said. "Thought about it and read again."
With no other schooling, so much of what you write and say is new and refreshing. If I was writing dialogue. I'd likely give the other, "he said." My line above would have no attribution.
Thanks for the detailed rhythm dialogue!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!