Post the second

National Novel Writing Month, followed quickly by the use of dialogue tags.

Well I said I'd talk about National Novel Writing Month this week, and I will, albeit briefly. NaNoWriMo, is an opportunity for people who have always wanted to write a novel, or have never finished a novel to get a little bit of a push in the right direction. You pledge to finish a 50,000 word novel with in the month of November. Of course there's only one more week so don't forget to sign up next year.
Now on to a a subject that's near and dear to my heart. Dialogue tags. In the year or so I've been working in Fiction writing classes problems with dialogue are probably the number one thing that comes up again and again. (Not to mention dailogue grammar but we'll get there later).
Tags are tricky because you want the reader to know what your character is feeling while they're talking. But as Anne M. Marble points out in her blog it's easy to over use fancy dialogue tags. Most readers will ignore said since they're so use to saying it, but of course thats boring. However if you continually use, hissed, lauged, screamed, ect it will be to distracting. So what now?
An excellent option is instead of using tags like this use narration. For instance you could say:
"I'll kill you!" screamed Charles.
However, this is still rather dry. Instead you could say:
"I'll kill you!" Charles brandished a knife at her.
Using actions instead of Dialogue tags can bring the reader more deeply into the narrative, and are simply more interesting to read then simple dialogue tags.