Dialogue forms a fundamental part of fiction writing. It's how the characters talk to one another—or how they don't talk—that provides insight into what is going on within a scene and what the characters might think about it. It's through dialogue that we can get the actual thoughts of other characters, not just the POV character. So much story often revolves around the dialogue.

However, when writing dialogue, many writers still new to the craft will fall back into an excessive use of dialogue tags. I have written about this some years ago, in the post Billy said... Diana said... In that post, I spoke about how it's not just the use of the word said that causes the issue. It's the over-excessive use of dialogue tags in general that can disrupt the flow of a story.

There are many writers and editors out there who will argue that using the word said isn't a problem. Even Stephen King says this. They rightly argue that our brains are trained to overlook the word said and move on. If you shift to the other dialogue tags (e.g., cried, shouted, bellowed, hissed, growled), our eyes are drawn to them, and we notice them.

This is all true, but the publishing industry as a whole is shifting away from the printed form (and I'm including eBooks as a printed form for this discussion). Audio books are taking a hold, giving people the ability to check out the latest book from their favorite author while they're out walking the dog. Whatever is on that printed page is directly translated to audio form, and the two ARE NOT the same.

Punctuation has a direct impact on this, bringing into question within editors' circles about how rigid we need to be with the punctuation rules. Whereas issues like the he-said-she-said fest become so obvious when read aloud.

A few months ago, I found myself in a conversation with other editors about a description that was given to a particular type of chair, asking whether people would actually know what a writer was referring to if they just used the name of the chair. There was a photo posted with the original post of some rusted chair that glided back and forth. You should have seen the comments that went back and forth about locality and age of editors. It was mad. Then I piped in, looking at the sample writing that was provided in the original post and the clunky description that was given to the chair.

In my comments, I provided a potential rework to the passage to smooth out the sentence flow and highlight the significance of the chair itself, but in my rework I had changed the name of the chair from glider to rocker. OMG, I was lynched, because apparently there is a big difference between a glider and a rocker.

My response to the lynch mob: Who cares what the chair is actually called? What matters is why the character is noticing it in the first place. (I think I actually wrote that on the forums too.) What is the significance of this chair, whatever it was called, to the plot?