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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45314
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The first thing you need to realise is that the advice from AuthorHouse needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt - they are a vanity press which expect you to pay to have your book published, unlike the more traditional publishing houses. Therefore it is in their benefit for you to stick with them, regardless of the quality of your book.

Not everyone at a writers group will be helpful - some authors can be very invested in what they consider the right way to do things, which can make them much more critical than an average reader. However, if multiple people are mentioning similar issues it's probably worth trying to improve it, and overuse of certain words can be very jarring even to a casual reader. Fundamentally you want to write fiction that people will want to read, so people's responses to your writing are important.

If even a minority of readers genuinely can't tell who's speaking a particular line of dialogue then that's a big problem.

This can be fixed without adding too many identifiers, by carefully considering whether a character would actually say the dialogue you've written. Each character should be coming into a scene with their own aims, mood and personality, and these things should show up in their speech. It's possible your characters are too uniform in their opinions, that there isn't conflict or disagreement between them, or that they all seem to socialise and communicate in the same way. Be particularly careful about this in exposition scenes; it's possible to be so focused on what needs saying in a scene that you essentially come up with the dialogue then distribute it across the character in the room.

Even if you end up adding loads of identifiers they can be more interesting than "x said" and "y said." Combine the dialogue with descriptions of body language and facial expressions to indirectly attach a character name to a line. For example:

> Joseph stopped typing and stared over at Alice. "You can't seriously be suggesting what I think you are."

If the writers group isn't helping you write then don't feel you have to keep going - it's meant to be for your benefit. However your writing is not perfect, and probably never will be, so be wary of people telling you it is, and make sure you're not dismissing critiques out of hand.

Original score: 8