She’s so nice, MIn. Do you really think she would have bent over backwards to help him clean the office after he stood her up? At the very least, he should be treating her to coffee and chocolate after they play ball!

Just for conversation’s sake, a couple months ago I learned that editors are frowning on the use of taglines. They prefer “said”, but don’t like to see it used much. One source even recommended only a few times in a full-length novel. They would rather you replace any dialog tags with action beats. So to show who is speaking, you show what they’re doing while talking, rather than just attributing a tag with their name.

The same source said no more than two “ly” adverbs in the whole book. That was hard to swallow! They said editors joke all the time about starting to charge writers for each “ly” word that they try to keep in their manuscript.

I guess it depends on if she likes him? I guess perhaps my teenaged mind thought that that kind of thing is what a girl does (if she doesn’t punch him) to spend more time with the guy.

I could see where “said” could really get annoying after a while. I think I remarked earlier that I may have done too much through dialog and not through description (or whatever term is the opposite of dialog!). I don’t think it was until I got into the professional world that I bumped into a technical writer that said I should convey more action in my writing.

How in the world do you get by with only two “ly” adverbs in a book!? One of the biggest things I thought I fixed in college was to learn that he didn’t “do it quick” but he “did it quickly”. I’m constantly (another one) hearing people use an adverb without the ly and I was taught that it was incorrect. Am I wrong?!

Yes, if she likes him, she’ll probably bend over backwards for him. But, here’s the thing. When I first joined American Christian Fiction Writers and started querying different pros about my manuscript, they all said it didn’t have enough conflict between the major characters. So, I’ve learned to ratchet up the conflict whenever possible. But it has to be believable. You had conflict in that scene to a degree, just by having the paint fall on her and mess her clothes up. By now, he should really be in love, because she’s about the easiest going woman in the universe about what some would think of as a really bad day! I mean, going from having a gun in your face to being stood up…to having decent clothes ruined…

The “ly” thing is a pain. Established authors get away with it all the time, just as they get away with multiple points of view (POV’s) in the same scene. It’s something new writers for the CBA market can not get away with. You’re not having to deal with it extensively in this book, because it’s told from Adam’s pov, in first person. If you were doing a multiple pov book in third person, you’d have to make sure each new scene was firmly in only one character’s viewpoint. It really makes for a better story. I used to fuss about it, but I’m getting to the point that reading book in which the author doesn’t adhere to this “rule” really gets annoying fast. Do I really need to be in the head of the EMS guy when I’m not going to see him ever again in this book? My books are in third person, with the hero/heroine’s pov only.

It is correct grammar to write “get it done quickly”, unless your character doesn’t follow grammatical rules, then in dialog, they can butcher English however they please. The deal with limiting adverbs, is that editors want strong writing. When you depend on adverbs all the time, your verbs are usually weak. And it flashes the red flag of “telling” the story, rather than “showing” the story.

I’d say the weakness of relying on mostly dialog to tell your story, is that you’re missing the other senses. I’ve read writing craft books, and had writing instructors say that authors need to write with all 6 senses. The sixth being an intuitive one. So let your readers in on the smells, sights, sounds, feels and tastes of your book. Treat the setting as another character so we can picture being right there, as we would in a movie theater with it all around us. How can you show us that? Write it.

Are you trying to make a writer out of me?!