DreamCloud
Really Really Experienced
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2014
- Posts
- 403
This. When an author relies heavily on adverbs in speech tags (or indeed fancy verbs - "he sniped", "she exaggerated") it leaves me feeling that they don't have confidence in the dialogue they've written. It's a "show, don't tell" thing.
IME fancy adverbs/speech verbs are more useful for indirect speech, where they're replacing dialogue.
I like adverbs and fancy verbs - it may be a juvenile way to write, but I think they add flavor to the story. Hell, I haven't even been writing 6 months. I am still an infant working my way up to juvenile.
I have two stories in the pipeline. When I am done with those, I will experiment with sparser dialog commentary. Obviously, there is a consensus building that points to another, possibly better, way.