In the quote above, Anne Buist tackles the practicalities of dialogue, the kind of stuff you think you know, and inevitably forget when you’re in the throes of writing.
The thing is, everyone does it — adds a dialogue tag, or a get caught up in explaining every emotion behind exclamations that can stand for themselves. I think it’s the nature of writing, of getting caught up in a bigger picture and forgetting about the smaller details. The trick is recognising it, going back and editing this stuff out.
It’s the speaking out loud part that I didn’t think of before: have you tried it? Does it help you figure out if your dialogue is working?
It’s true – you often want to tag most times people talk, but if the reader KNOWS who is speaking and you don’t need to explain the emotion, etc. then leaving out tags is a good idea. Too many tags can overload a story anyway.