“I love you,” she prevaricated.
Some writers seem to think the example above is something to which all of us should aspire. Having graded thousands of high school stories and essays loaded to the margins with I lisped, and she labored, I can’t agree.
Contrary to the standard high school dictum, said and replied can be great options. Both are virtually invisible, inaudible; we read right past them into the heart of the quote itself, which is surely what we ought to be doing most of the time. At the same time, they help us to keep our place.
All the essential elements of the original are there, and yet this seems to my ear immeasurably worse. The problem is that the quote itself is rushed. Vengeance, as both a notion and a word, deserves its own space. If this were a film (and I haven’t watched the show far enough to see if it plays out this way) the actor would pause after the word, but an author can’t write explicit instructions to the reader: Pause here to consider my genius. Linger on this carefully chosen word.
Instead, the author controls the pace of the reading in other ways, in this case, through the dialogue tag, which is extended to include a single action and a description of Doran’s voice. My altered version, on the other hand, sounds like a grocery list: While you’re picking up the Captain Crunch, bananas, and milk, don’t forget the vengeance, justice, fire, and blood.
And, of course, in none of this is there a role for trumpeting, gasping, prevaricating, or any of the other tags I spent that childhood morning listing. Doran’s tag is punched up from said to whispered, but the verb doesn’t draw attention to itself. Its function isn’t to tell us how Doran is speaking – we’ve just had a description of his voice – it is, like all the other words around it, to slow the line of dialogue, to let each one of those brutal nouns hit home with all its force.