Writing a book is often at the top of a new writer's list of goals. And the moment they start asking for advice, "gurus" crawl out of the woodwork with rules and lessons. Most of which are complete nonsense. And one of the most controversial of those RULES involves how to handle dialogue tags.
The dreaded adverb. Genre writing tells you to never use adverbs. Some programs even flag them so you can eradicate them from your manuscript. What are these terrible creatures? And do you need to fumigate them?
Prompted by a recent encounter with an idiot, I felt the need to clarify the actual rules for writing.
