Piers Anthony is an example of an individual who doesn’t think he is “breaking the rules”, because he has an entirely different set of rules. In his case, as he has described in one or more author’s notes, his using the word “said” more than once in a book is treated with the same level of scrutiny that Elmore Leonard throws out on exlamation points in his top 10 rules.

Whether you like Anthony’s novels or not, I think you’d be hard pressed to say that he seems “visible” in the stories because he’s avoiding using the word “said”. Yes, he avoids words like asseverated, but if you are keeping in synch with the character’s actions, you can get away with yelps or cries or other descriptive dialog words that don’t leave the reader wondering if the author used “said” so many times because they wrote their story on the bus and didn’t have access to their thesaurus at the time….