Truer Than True: Talking with Laura Munson
Laura Munson discusses her first novel, WILLA’S GROVE.
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Posts Tagged: Dialogue
Stories We Tell Ourselves: A Conversation with Miranda Popkey
Miranda Popkey discusses her debut novel, TOPICS OF CONVERSATION.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #167: Josh Denslow
“It was a relief to be out of the confines of scriptwriting. I was having fun again.”
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Like Juggling Knives: Talking with Rumaan Alam
Rumaan Alam discusses his new novel, That Kind of Mother, the limits of the employer-employee relationship, and the grossness of heterosexual sex.
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Love Thy Neighbor: Talking with Yewande Omotoso
Writer, poet, and architect Yewande Omotoso discusses her second novel, The Woman Next Door, Cape Town’s haunting beauty, and mythologies about motherhood.
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Bodies Testing Boundaries: The Worlds We Think We Know by Dalia Rosenfeld
The Worlds We Think We Know by Dalia Rosenfeld is a profound debut that carefully undermines the foundational assumptions we have about other people.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, let’s talk about dialogue. As with any facet of writing, there are “rules.” Don’t be too formal—real people don’t talk like the dictionary. Don’t be so informal—all that slang is distracting. Use dialogue tags sparingly. Use more dialogue tags to clarify who is speaking. Always use quotation marks! Throw out the quotation marks! […]
...moreA Writer’s Writer
I wanted to talk about ambiguity and loss with this book. Love can be a source of power and joy, but it’s so precarious. A relationship ends and one can’t fully explain why or what it was. In a conversation with Electric Literature, writer Rachel B. Glaser talks about her novel Paulina & Fran, point […]
...moreQuote Unquote
The benefits of quotation marks may seem obvious, but are there drawbacks? Over at The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark makes the case for leveling the linguistic playing field: One is potentially offensive, controversial, even incendiary; the other is simple reportage. It transfers the meaning to a character and away from the author. But the point […]
...moreBeating Writer’s Block
For Intelligent Life, Tim de Lisle captured some of Philip Pullman’s wisdom from his most recent interview, including his advice on how to get over writer’s block: If you’re stuck, if you’re really desperate—dialogue: “Hello.” “Oh hello.” “How are you?” “Not too bad, thanks. How are you?” “Not too bad.” Half a page already.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
In response to Dave Eggers’s new book, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live For Ever?, Alex Kalamaroff takes us on a guided tour of the “dialogue novel,” a genre where conversation between characters is “the primary or only means of narrative advancement.” Kalamaroff boils the genre down to three sub-categories. Within […]
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“The.” “Dialogue?” “Novel!”
Dialogue novels and stories are worth reading not simply because of their unique structures, but because of how they engage us.
...moreDialogue with an Astronaut
When I started the book, I hadn’t planned on it being only dialogue. I knew it would be primarily a series of interviews, or interrogations, but I figured there would be some interstitial text of some kind. But then as I went along, I found ways to give direction and background, and even indications of […]
...moreWhen Incorrect Grammar Is Just the Right Thing
Vol. 1 Brooklyn has a nifty recurring feature called “Making Progress,” in which they interview writers about their process during projects that are still unfinished. In the latest installment, James Yeh has some really enchanting thoughts about “language that is in some way ‘off’” and how he uses it as a jumping-off point. The first […]
...moreHenry Green
The Times Literary Supplement has published an edited version of a lecture given by critic and novelist James Wood celebrating English author Henry Green. Henry Green (the nom de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke) is remembered for his 1945 novel Loving, his attention to class (especially the working-class), and his mastery of dialogue:
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