HIDING DIALOGUE The English playwright Harold Pinter was famous for his dialogue. This is what he had to say about the reaction to his work: We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: ‘Failure of communication’… and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that […]
Around the publication of Patience, I’ve written and posted a few scattered things that link up in lots of sneaky ways – so I’m doing an ICYMI blog. First thing was my blog here explaining the whole thing, and why the book is so important to me. The fuller story of writing the novel, I […]
(This is the written version of the podcast I did for my publisher, Galley Beggar Press. If you’d rather listen to it, you can do so on Soundcloud or Stitcher.) Could you just sit still for half an hour. Just that. Sit still, without distraction or interruption? For thirty minutes. No phone, no screen, no music, no […]
On the occasion the release of his latest long-playing record, ‘Thanks for the Dance’, here’s a song of thanks for Leonard Cohen. A Singer Sang a Song To you, far off but sailing near, to you, so close you disappear, and you, whose distance is unclear – a singer did not get […]
BACK TO THOSE THREE MODELS OF DIALOGUE I am going to give you three models of dialogue, to help you think about what’s going on when people speak to each other on the page. (If you’ve read the Starting to Write – Lesson 4: Writing better dialogue, you’ll have seen a version of what follows. You can […]
EVERYTHING IS DIALOGUE I don’t just mean two people in a book talking, and it being received in written down form. By ‘Everything is dialogue’, I mean that if your writing has the sense of different voices intruding on one another – not always monologuing, not always singing in the same key – it will […]
ALL BY YOURSELF One of the biggest faults in stories by less experienced writers is that they are about extremely isolated people – people who start off by being isolated and don’t end up making much contact with others. This is not, in itself, a bad idea. There have been many wonderful stories about people […]
CONTROL This is something I have only become aware of in the past few years, but I think it is worth bringing it up. If you have a person in your story (we’re back to people, off characters) who has enough money or powerful enough friends to get them easily out of trouble, your story […]
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