Dialog Tags
Part of being an aspiring writer is receiving feedback, and a big part of getting feedback is giving it. I've belonged to several critique sites over the years, including but not limited to deviantART (which, while a good site, leaves much to be desired if your goal is useful feedback on lengthly prose), Critique Circle (which is a great site, but I started to have trouble keeping up with the queue), and Scribophile (which is useful, but unfortunately much of the useful bits for novel-writers require that you sign up for the premium membership).
However, the point of this post isn't to analyze the various websites out there, but rather to emphasize a piece of common advice I've found myself giving lately. It's about something that should be simple, but isn't: dialog tags.
Something that should really be as easy as she said gives a lot of people trouble, sometimes because they don't understand the nature of the dialog tag, and sometimes because they try too hard. There are a couple of common mistakes that, while technically grammatically correct, should be avoided by anyone who wants their work taken seriously.
While technically "wrylies" is a bit of screenwriting jargon referring to parentheticals in a script, it's the one that's stuck with me over the years. They're also called "Tom Swifties," but I prefer the screenwriting term. An example is:
Noir and Urban Fantasy
Awhile back, I joined a fiction community at livejournal.com called Prose Challenge. The community's "blurb" is
This is a community for those of you that enjoy creative writing. Every one - two weeks a new challenge will be posted. As an example, we might give you a title, an opening sentence, a picture, or something completely different. It is then up to you to write a story of up to 5000 words that links to the prompt we gave you. You do not have to enter every single challenge, it's up to you which ones you feel like doing.
and while I can't come up with something for every challenge, I usually try. It's a good community, and the prompts help keep me inspired to write, and I enjoy the practice of having to actually finish pieces every week; endings are much harder to practice than beginnings, after all.
I bring this up because this week's (week 33!) challenge is to write a film noir piece that takes place in an unusual location. While I often describe myself as an urban fantasy reader primarily, the truth is that my absolute favorite niche of the sci-fi/fantasy genre is what I like to call "noir fantasy." The Dresden Files (beginning with STORM FRONT) by Jim Butcher are a good example of this, as are Glen Cook's Garrett, P.I. books (beginning with SWEET SILVER BLUES), the Cal Leandros (NIGHTLIFE) books by Rob Thurman, The Vampire Files (BLOODLIST) by P.N. Elrod, and the Nightside (WELCOME TO THE NIGHTSIDE) books by Simon R. Green.