I remember writing my first book, how I’d agonise over every sentence, desperately not wanting to commit some awful grammar faux pas.  I’d haul all my books off my bookshelves and examine them minutely for all sorts of perceived faults in my writing – like correct sentence structure and trying to figure out how my writing heroes managed to make me hear and see their characters so intensely, rather than just read words on pages.  This resulted in a horribly over-edited book, with bits constantly being taken out and replaced or moved around.  Hello grammar gremlin hell of the future.  They still pop up today.

Eventually I realised that no matter how famous the writers, none of them followed any particular pattern.  Some of them conveyed conversations using he said or she said.  Some of them used no attributives at all for dialogue, but you still managed to know who…