Is it "said David" or "David said"?

For a long time, I never realized this was an issue that anyone worried about. Then I started hearing about it on forums, and then I started noticing funny patterns in other places, like books.

People worry about whether their dialog tags should read like this:

"Xxxxxx," said David.

Or like this:

"Xxxxxx," David said.

First, a simple declaration: both are correct.
For those of you who may have doubts, I'll refer you to earlier English where "quoth he" was very common. English is a very flexible language, and the two variants are just that - totally acceptable variants.

That said, I have a very strong instinct about when to use one of these and when to use the other. For me, either makes sense, but there are times when one or the other is definitely more appropriate. I just figured out this afternoon - for the first time on a conscious level - why I choose one or the other.

The answer is: meter.

Many authors manage meter subconsciously and it never becomes part of their conscious concern. This is totally okay, but for those who wish to control it a bit more consciously, I have a couple of posts about it:

Some thoughts on meter
Banjo Patterson and meter
Many Voices (often at least partly distinguished by meter)

Today what brought me my epiphany was one example from my current novel. I was writing along and I came to this:

"Petr," Tagret said.

No problem, right? But we were in a situation where Tagret was trying to get Petr's attention so that he wouldn't jump into a fight. So I then changed it to,

"Petr," Tagret said quickly.

I read it over, and suddenly "Tagret said" jumped out at me as wrong. Here I was trying to have him say something quickly, but it didn't feel quick. I could feel a giant pause right where the quote ended, and it was slowing me down.

"Petr,"
Tagret said quickly.

So I switched it to:

"Petr," said Tagret quickly.

The pause disappeared. When I set out to analyze the source of my impression that there had been a pause, I realized that both "Petr" and "Tagret" have the same metrical shape: the trochaic foot, "Xx", where the large X is a stressed syllable and the small x is an unstressed syllable. The version that had "Tagret said" therefore had a break between metric feet that corresponded with the end of the quote, and that gives the impression of a pause. The version with "said Tagret" creates a dactyllic foot with three syllables "Xxx" which falls across the division between the quote and the dialogue tag, thereby pulling readers more quickly toward the end of the sentence.

I suppose that means if you have someone speak in a halting or hesitant way, you might serve yourself better by choosing a metrical pattern that reinforces breaks of this nature.

Anyway, that's my attempt at giving indecisive folks out there (said Joe? Joe said?) a reasoned way to decide which tag to choose in context.

Banjo Patterson and Meter

As I experiment with writing a new group of aliens, and at the same time while I prepare a long post on voice (which is as yet not ready to go), I've been thinking quite a bit about meter. I did a post about it here some time ago, here, which lists different types of metrical feet (units), etc.

English has a natural rhythm to its patterns of stressed and non-stressed syllables. That rhythm is generally iambic, or composed of sets of syllables of the following pattern:

x X = one iambic foot

Where a small x is unstressed, and a large one is stressed.

A lot of people, hearing the word "iambic" probably think of Shakespeare and panic. True, Shakespeare did the whole iambic thing beautifully:

"Shall I / compare / thee to / a sum/mer's day?"

(I'll note that the unstressed syllable on "to" is an exception, but an accepted one within this meter. It's explicable, but too complex to go into here.)

But it's probably easy to confuse Shakespeare's use of meter with his use of language generally, and think that it's somehow linked to archaisms and worthy of panic.

Not so.

To illustrate, I bring to your attention the poetry of Banjo Patterson, a perfectly wonderful Australian poet whose work we read tonight at the dinner table. He's the guy who wrote the poem behind the movie, "The Man from Snowy River," and I thought I'd show you a sample from that poem and the poem "Mulga Bill's Bicycle." (The complete poems can be found at the links.)

First, from Mulga Bill's Bicycle (1896):

'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze;
He turned away the good old horse that served him many days;
He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen;
He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine;
And as he wheeled it through the door, with air of lordly pride,
The grinning shop assistant said, "Excuse me, can you ride?"

This is basically perfect iambic heptameter - seven iambs to a line. And if you go and read the poem, it's not archaic or stilted. It's hilarious.

Next, iambic with a twist, from The Man from Snowy River (1890):

There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away,
And had joined the wild bush horses — he was worth a thousand pound,
So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.
All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far
Had mustered at the homestead overnight,
For the bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are,
And the stock-horse snuffs the battle with delight.

This one alternates lines of seven and five feet, and does a really interesting extra thing as well - the first foot of all but two of the lines is an anapestic foot, like this:

x x X = one anapestic foot

I can't help but wonder if Banjo Patterson was thinking of horses galloping when he pulled that particular trick. It's marvelous stuff.

I hope you all get a chance to enjoy his work.

Some thoughts on Meter

I'm talking about poetic meter. You know, what we learned when we learned Shakespeare, mostly iambic pentameter, but also spondaic tetrameter or trochaic hexameter or any of those other bizarrely named things.

Here's a brief review of a few terms, with examples.

foot: a set of grouped syllables that form the most basic unit of a metrical pattern.
iamb: a foot with one weak syllable followed by one strong syllable. x X "She comes."= 1 iamb
trochee: a foot with one strong syllable followed by one weak syllable. X x "Hit her." = 1 trochee
spondee: a foot with two stressed syllables. X X "Bob Smith" = 1 spondee
anapest: a foot with two weak syllables followed by one strong one. x x X "He has gone to the edge of the road."= 3 anapests
dactyl: a foot with one strong syllable followed by two weak ones. X x x "Gone are the days of the foresters."= 3 dactyls

Meter is not just for poetry and Shakespearean plays.

Whether in poetry or prose, meter is all about flow - the feel of the language as it streams by. I read a discussion on the Absolute Write forum recently which concerned the difference between "on" and "upon" and which should be used in a particular context. My own sense came far more from an instinctive desire to align the meter of the sentence in question than from a general preference for "upon" versus "on."

It is often said that the natural meter of English is iambic. This is because we generally like our sentences to have an alternating pattern of strong and weak syllables. I have a character I'm working on who speaks entirely in iambic pentameter, and while he does sound archaic at times, my goal is not to have any of his lines come across as ta-TUM-tee-UM-tee-UM-tee-UM-tee-UM. Fortunately, there is some flexibility in the metrical rules which allows for the occasional foot with reversed stress, and the occasional extra syllable.

Here's a random couplet of iambic pentameter (totally unrelated to my novel!) which doesn't sound much like poetry to me:

"In utero, the baby undergoes a lengthy process of uneven growth."

By altering this natural rhythm, you can achieve effects that act a lot like onomatopoeia. In action and situations of stress you can use strong syllables to break flow intentionally: a few trochees and spondees can go a long way. This is one of the things that can help you create the effect of a regional accent, for example, without requiring extensive alterations of spelling.

When I'm looking for a voice for an alien, I make sure to consider the meter of his or her speech, even if I don't use that meter strictly in the alien viewpoint. The gecko-girl Allayo (Let the Word Take Me) spoke in an unmeasured meter that I based on the intonation of sacred readings, because that fit well with the fact that she considered her language to be sacred. When I thought about designing a wolf alien, I tried to use anapests to influence the dialogue so that the speech would come across in a loping rhythm.

All right, that's enough for now. I'll let you go have fun with it.