it's a One Punch Man fic which regrettably devolves into bog standard bs after the first chapter so I didn't bookmark, but I just saw an A/B/O fic where the omega is initially obsessed with covering everything with Axe, and has been doing so since middle school. And it turns out that it's because Axe smells of Alpha scent. Which is honestly the funniest idea I've ever seen in one of these things.
"He closed his eyes, revealing his eyelids" Yes, that's what tends to happen when human characters close their eyes.
I can understand if there was something unusual on said eyelids (a tattoo? a weird bug? rhinestones? a tiny, secret stash of jerky?), but otherwise.....
Accidentally hitting the kudos button on fics I don't like because this tablet is hard to use properly.
Sometimes I read fics where the writing is all very good except that the author is way too heavy on using said-substitutes, which takes me out of the story a little, forces me to process a new action/emotion marker for every line of dialogue, makes me feel like everything said is being overacted, etc, etc. Which is regrettable, but fine. I guess some people were advised at some point that writing this way was actually a good thing? Today I've found a fic that has that problem except that the said-substitute used most often is "snorted". One of the characters snorts every other line of dialogue. It makes me worry about his sinus health and it's acoustically unpleasant to imagine. Why is he snorting so much?????
Advising people to use other words besides said is fairly common in English classes from what I know. Some other things that end up being considered bad writing by many are taught as being better in those. Heavy usage of metaphors is encouraged by the way the things are introduced, for example. It's not until college that I had a teacher who slapped the class in the face with "Keep it simple, stupid," as a writing style.
Though I will say that I dislike the hard and extreme pushback to this phenomenon. Which is to say the "Using alternatives to said is always bad forever," sentiment. When, no, it's really more a case of what one does with it. It's not that these other words are bad. It's that they're being used awkwardly. Or I suppose in some cases it's just a subjective my tastes are different sort of deal. Like how I hate Hemmingway-esque writing, but it's not really bad. Mostly though it seems to be a reaction to really poorly done usage of these substitutions. Which might be part of the problem, honestly. They're looked at as substitutions and not unique tools. Not looked at as words that can stand on their own right and which may be appropriate to certain contexts.
It's distressingly common writing advice in general, in my experience. Now, granted, only using "said" is really awkward a lot of the time. That being said (no pun intended), the overuse of alternate terms looks way, way dumber, IMO--especially since so fucking often the advice is to never use "said," even when that's what would make the most sense. (I compensate by using dialogue tags as infrequently as possible, but that's probably more of a personal writing quirk than anything else?) In fact, I'm reminded just the other day, @seed found a list of "substitutes," and I use that word very loosely (hence the quotation marks) because most of them...don't work: Yeah. Never mind the fact that half of these aren't even words that are actually used to denote speech, ever. I swear, it's like substituting sand for sugar in a cake. :/ EDIT: And I completely agree with what you just said, Aon. (Sorry, was typing this up when you posted the second message. :P)
Yeah no overuse and poor use of them definitely looks dumber than only ever using said. At least the latter just bears the crime of being boring or overly clinical to read. The poor use of alternatives to said is just...silly. Ejaculated has always been my favorite. Because I mean. He ejaculated. What's not to love about that.
I am eternally and ever-increasingly grateful for my high school creative writing teacher who had a book of 2-4 sentence text samples from various books and authors and had us dig into the nitty-gritty of word choice and sentence structure of one every day.
