Except for when you're Irvine Welsh: She pulls back her heid, shuts her eyes and opens her mooth, givin oot an orgasmic groan. Sick Boy's eyes are now innocent and full ay wonder, his expression like a bairn thit's come through oan Christmas morning tae a pile ay gift-wrapped presents stacked under the tree. They baith look strangely beautiful and pure in the flickering candlelight. or Anthony Burgess: So we scatted out into the big winter nochy and walked down Marghanita Boulevard and then turned into Boothby Avenue, and there we found what we were pretty well looking for, a malenky jest to start off the evening with. There was a doddery starry schoolmaster type veck, glasses on and his rot open to the cold nochy air. He had books under his arm and a crappy umbrella and was coming round the corner from the Public Biblio, which not many lewdies used these days. or James Joyce: What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods! Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh! Where the Baddelaries partisans are still out to mathmaster Malachus Micgranes and the Verdons cata-pelting the camibalistics out of the Whoyteboyce of Hoodie Head. Assiegates and boomeringstroms. As well as probably a thousand other examples.
I find it hard to address this issue without knowing the context. Is this a character remembering a conversation? Then maybe quotation marks aren't needed unless you want to emphasize the exact words. Or is it the narrator relating a past conversation? Then you could establish that the narrator has shifted times and use normal tags. Or is it a character repeating the conversation to someone else? Then you might be able to use use single quotes inside double and normal tags: "'Your father never liked living here,' the man said," John said. (better might be to not need the "John said" or to use a beat here instead.) If you do use "the man said," then just use it once and then use "he'd said" -- or no tag at all if it's obviously still the man speaking.
This is showing a lack of understanding of what the "had" means. If your writing is in the past tense, you can use "had" to go even further in the past. Examples: I was passing the cheese shop when I realized it was the place where I had met Jane. I didn't want to have lunch with Josh. I had eaten with him six times in the past year, and every single time he'd managed to stick me with the check. I went to the closet to get the jacket, and then I remembered--at Christmas, I had spilled cranberry sauce in the sleeve. This might help: https://www.ef.edu/english-resources/english-grammar/past-perfect-tense/ https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/english-grammar/past-perfect
I do feel like I missed something. Was this subthread of the thread triggered by an incorrect claim that the use of “had” in the original post was actually incorrect?
I was more responding to the statement that "the author CANNOT break rules." I didn't think it was sound advice and propagates the notion that there are hard fast rules to writing instead of just guidelines that one can easily ignore so long as they understand why these guidelines exist.
I totally agree. I just didn't understand which rule was supposedly broken. (Aside from the example with the yellow and blue dress, which was clearly written for the purpose of being wrong.)
@jimbond68 I had to write dialogue within dialogue a few times in my novel. I don't know if it works all that well for everybody, but I used italics as well as quote marks to set off the internal dialogue. I wouldn't want to use italics for long passages, but I think it works well enough here. Just using quote marks alone could get confusing. In this passage, my character Jessie is telling Joe about things her father said, several years before. Joe is the first speaker in this excerpt:
@EBohio 's homework I was passing the cheese shop when I realized it was the place where I had met Jane. Maybe she had had the Gorgonzola in her palm, or perhaps she had had had her fill of the blue vein cheese on that wintry afternoon? I passed the cheese shop when I realised it was the place where I met Jane. Yes, in 1927. Maybe she held Gorgonzola in her palm, or perhaps like the grand metaphor to our waning relationship, the woman tired of blue vein cheese on that wintry afternoon? Not that I am a cheese.
How about: "I'd said it was bs, but then I learned basic grammar and realized that past perfect tense is a thing, so I stopped making aggressively inaccurate statements on WF and regretted all the misinformation I'd tried to spread before I figured things out."
There is nothing wrong whatsoever in what you've said. However, it's not a conversation within a conversation, which is, I think, what the OP was getting at? Unless I've picked it up wrongly? @jimbond68 Taking Jenissej's example and fitting it into the OP's situation, it would be Jim actually speaking: "I remember the conversation clearly," Jim said. "The man's exact words were, 'Your father never liked living here.' I was so surprised to hear that. Dad never let on."
Google it. "I'd said" in quotes. I get 3.5 million results. If I write it out as "I had said" I get almost 30 million results. The past perfect is grammatically valid and used in a wide variety of circumstances. Your willful ignorance of grammar is not, thankfully, a universal condition.
Your examples ARE the ways of properly saying it. "I wish I had said it" is fine. A guy saying, "remember when you had said you wish you could..." is not. Whew, I can see this is going to be one of those threads. Before I get a headache, I'm leaving it.
But what about all these other examples I've accumulated in five seconds of Googling that may or may not adhere to your vague and undefined rules of proper usage?
"But Daddy, remember when you had said you wish you could walk?" "That was years ago before my Ferrari wheelchair," said @EB. He waved the crowd away with his stick.
Past perfect tense isn't b.s. Its principal use is to relate chronological relationship between a pair of past events: Mike warned Trevor that Carver was a con man wanted by the feds, but Trevor had paid thousands already on the useless swampland. This use of past perfect establishes that Trevor was suckered before Mike warned him. A writer need not use every possible verb tense, but it's still important to know the purpose of the various verb tenses.
So, your incorrect example remains incorrect. That’s really not the least bit relevant to the original poster’s question. There’s no shame in being unfamiliar with a grammar concept. The problem is in trying to make decrees about something you don’t understand.
Oh boy, this thread has derailed good. Or as they say, this escalated quickly. (Or is that redundant? jk) Back on track: because of OP's example of "Your father never liked living here," the man had said. I assumed it was more like a re-telling or memory of sorts, and not a conversation within a conversation, but I do like your solution. In any case, I think even then OP could use 'had said' (even if it's more for emphasis than proper tense). "I'm sure I heard him right," Jim said. "The man had said, my father never liked living here. Unbelievable, isn't it?"
Yeah. The only difference between your approach and mine is that mine contains a direct quote from 'the man.' It all depends on what the OP wanted to do. I'm still not sure.
My own approach has been a bit different. At first I dropped the "quotations" (before noticing Cormac McCarthy and Hubert Selby Jr. don't use them either) but now I've ditched "dialogue" altogether and give summaries of the conversation. Examples: Two crows are spying from the end of a drooping power-line. One caws slowly, asking a question of the other. What are those two doing down there? What’s she doing with him? Dan hugs me with just one arm, asking if I want to go home with him. I say no. I always say no, you know, and its better that way because I know it can’t do either of us any good. Come on, he insists while peeling his clammy hand from my back, there’s nothing to worry about. He says it in the same way that Marcus did; with a nervous and knowing smile. There’s nothing to worry about. ... I grit my teeth and suckle my tongue. Dan sighs. He tells me that if he sold his entire collection he could afford a trip around the world. They must be worth thousands, he groans; several thousands of dollars—enough to see the mountains in Nepal, the white cliffs of Dover, and the Grand Canyon. He wants to see them all, with his own eyes, but he can’t let go of his collection. They’re a part of him now.
Speaking as somebody who has had the immense good fortune to read a draft of this whole piece—snippets don't begin to do it justice—I can say this approach works tremendously well. It keeps us firmly in the head of the narrator, which, at times, is an uncomfortable place to be. But by just relaying her take on what other people say and what her responses are, we stay firmly in her head. This keeps everything and everybody else at a distance, which is what this character intentionally does. This is an exact example of how the choices a writer makes affects the reader. If he had given us the dialogue itself, we would have become slightly distracted from her, the narrator, and the effect the words have on her. The narrator lives in a closed and claustrophobic environment of her own making, and that's exactly what the author evokes. These are superb writing choices, in my opinion.
