Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash

Hi SEers. John with you again. I hope you had a great weekend and am rearing to go this Monday morning. Grab a cup of coffee and join me in a discussion about character gestures. (I know not the most exciting thing for a Monday morning.)

Most of you don’t know that my books contain an unusually high amount of dialogue. For some reason, I love to write dialogue and write it without tags. Why a lot of dialogue, and what’s up with no tags? The quantity of dialogue comes from my training on “show don’t tell.” I know dialogue works as a show vehicle. Writing dialogue without tags is my method of keeping the reader in the story. I believe that tags can pull a reader out of the story, especially if they require the mind to do any thinking about the tag.