Dialogue tags in Kidnapped

[regshoe]

I've been adding bits and pieces to the website over the last few weeks (and have made a 'Latest additions' section for the front page, for handy navigation thereof), and here's a new meta piece—which I shall experiment with posting there and linking here with a few more informal notes.

The language of Kidnapped: Dialogue tags (with a comparison to Flight of the Heron)

This was an interesting investigation! I started by basically just repeating the same things I'd done for FotH, and ended up finding some illustrations of what I think are the general differences between Broster's and Stevenson's writing styles. Further comparison of more general features of the two books—perhaps looking at things like sentence and paragraph length, proportion of dialogue, punctuation and vocabulary—would be very much worth doing to throw further light on this.

Only two of my four Kidnapped fics are in canon-style first person (well, one of the others is in first person but it barely has any dialogue). I see I do use Stevenson's favourite 'Dialogue,' said pronoun construction, though I don't manage such a strong bias towards it as Stevenson has. And I've never tried to use present-tense dialogue tags in an otherwise past-tense fic; given the commonness of errors in tense use as mistakes in fic I feel it's a risky move to try doing it deliberately, but perhaps I will try for a better canon pastiche the next time I want to write a really exciting first-person adventure fic. :D

Comments

[muccamukk]

Huh. I 100% didn't notice the present tense thing.

I just checked R. M. Ballantyne's The Lighthouse, a boys own adventure novel from 1865 (so rather earlier), and it definetely doesn't use present tense in tags except when quoting someone quoting someone else.

ETA: Checked some Ballantyne books from the 1880s, and found racism! but no present tense.

[regshoe]

It is really easy not to notice things like that when you're just reading, and I find that a lot of the fun of doing these language analyses is getting to see those details properly!

E. W. Hornung uses present tense in dialogue tags sometimes, though much less often than RLS (and, like the ones you found, many of them are for dialogue-within-dialogue—which I suppose supports my idea that this makes first-person narration feel more like 'character casually telling you a story'). I also found a couple in White Cockades by Edward Prime-Stevenson, but again only a couple.

[luzula]

Oh, interesting--I never noticed the present tense!

Some website notes: I don't think this reviewer has really got a handle on Keith's character! Windram, essentially the Englishman, loyal, unselfish, sometimes a little slow-minded. I mean, one can definitely argue for each of those--he's slow-minded when it comes to recognizing his own emotions, for sure, but not otherwise--but in general that's not the description I would choose.

Some non-fiction which you may have missed (although obviously don't feel like you have to include books which I have read but you have not):
https://luzula.dreamwidth.org/407103.html
https://luzula.dreamwidth.org/399052.html
https://luzula.dreamwidth.org/384655.html
https://luzula.dreamwidth.org/383803.html
https://luzula.dreamwidth.org/425177.html
https://luzula.dreamwidth.org/403027.html
https://luzula.dreamwidth.org/388980.html

My review of The Road Not Taken:
https://luzula.dreamwidth.org/397790.html

[regshoe]

It is really good fun doing these language analyses and getting to see the details of things that one often doesn't notice just reading!

Ah, thank you for all those links! There are definitely some books I'd forgotten in there—I'll add them in. :) And yeah, I agree—perhaps that reviewer has not got Keith's character much better than his name...

[brideoffrankenstein]

I haven't read either Kidnapped or FotH but this is so cool and interesting!

[regshoe]

Thank you :D