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Let’s Talk: Some Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts

Late Last Night Books

Dialogue is notoriously difficult. You have to make each character distinctive. The speech needs to sound natural. Unlike you, characters can’t deliberate about word choice. Here are some tips that may help.

DON’T have characters speak grammatically correctly. Dialogue reveals much about your characters, and when they talk like scholars giving lectures, their speech sounds contrived. Even college professors don’t got to follow no rules when chatting with friends. Vary grammatical mistakes for distinctive voices. One character can’t use the right prepositions for save his life. Another get subject-verb agreement wrong. Even if characters speak proper English . . .

DO have them speak in sentence fragments. Ordinarily we take pride in well-crafted sentences, and perhaps a character, say an academic, needs to be erudite or pompous.

Making Your Characters Real: Some Do’s and Dont’s

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Readers are pulled into a novel by the promise of a fascinating story. They finish the novel, though, because of intriguing, realistic characters. Here are a few “do’s” and “don’ts” that may help readers connect to your characters.

DO use real people. Everyone you know has a story that can enliven a fictional character.  When you discover that your neighbor whom you’ve known for ten years did jail time for torching a baby food plant, you see everything else about her in a different light. Those same people probably also have interesting traits—Sally likes to flip a quarter across her knuckles—or annoying habits—Henry hums “Muskrat Love” as he eats .  Be careful, though, that you . . .

DON’T use real names.

Tea, Sake, and a Glorious Life: An Interview with Novelist/Philosopher Carol Quinn

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Tea, Sake, and a Glorious Life: An Interview with Novelist/Philosopher Carol Quinn

Carol Quinn is Professor of Philosophy and a Women’s Studies Associate at Metropolitan State University of Denver and also holds Graduate Faculty status at University of Colorado Denver. She was the 2017 recipient of MSU Denver’s Outstanding Woman Faculty Award and LGBTQ Ally of the Year Award in 2013. Her new novel, The Glorious Life of Jessica Kraut, was released just two weeks ago from Rock’s Mill Press.

Ron Cooper: Carol, I’m excited about the appearance of your new novel. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first tell us something about your background—where you grew up, your education, your early academic interests, etc.

Carol Quinn: I am a California girl who deeply misses the ocean and was forcibly transplanted to Colorado.

Philosophy and Phiction: An Interview with author Sheridan Hough

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Sheridan Hough and I have much in common. We studied philosophy in graduate school. We are philosophy professors. We’re interested in 19th-century, European thinkers. I attended the College of Charleston (many, many years ago); she teaches at the College of Charleston.  More relevant here, we also write novels. Sheridan and I recently discussed the crossroads of philosophy and fiction.

RC: Sheridan, tell us about your academic background. How did you get interested in philosophy?

SH: Now there’s a story! Off I went to college—Trinity University—at the tender age of 17, and I was determined to be a double major in English and Theatre. My first class on my very first day at Trinity was ‘Ethics,’ and Plato’s Republic was on the menu.

Paul Ruffin: Literary Champion of Working People

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Paul Ruffin died in April of 2016, at the age of 74, leaving a literary legacy that numbered hundreds of poems, over a hundred short stories, as many essays, two novels, and countless inspired students, many of whom are successful writers themselves. Ruffin was born in Alabama, grew up in Mississippi, and spent most of his academic career at Sam Houston State University where he directed the creative writing program and founded the Texas Review and the Texas Review Press. In 2009, he was named the Texas Poet Laureate. Despite winning many awards and earning the praise of some of America’s best writers, like so many others labeled “a writer’s writer,” he never made a best-seller list. His fictional characters tend to be ordinary, rural people trying to survive in a world in which the odds seem stacked against them, his poems illuminate the nuances in that world that sometimes almost even out those odds, and his essays reveal his personal wagers against and reflections upon the gambles we all take with every move in this world of chance.

The Literary Redneck Mafia Boss: Novelist and Critic Eric Miles Williamson

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For years I read novels whose titles appeared on the New York Times Best Sellers list. I also read the Times Literary Supplement in which books were reviewed that didn’t make the Best Sellers list, and I read them, too. These had to be the best novels in the country, I thought, and many of them were written by long-famous authors, people I had heard of back when I was a college undergraduate majoring in English. The problem was that I never enjoyed any of them, although, Lord knows, I tried. I came to realize that most of those novels were written by, for, and about upper-middle and upper class professionals (not the world in which I grew up) and that not only did the plots occur within the realm of genteel characters but these authors’ styles shared a certain gentility.

Write Like Mike

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I get my students to discuss creativity and the limits of human achievement through the example of basketball legend Michael Jordan. Although he retired (for the second time) in 1999, his reputation as the greatest basketball player of all time and one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century guarantees that even my freshman students know about him. His gravity-mocking leaping ability, astonishing speed, and knack of always thinking two steps ahead of his opponents may never be matched. How does one, in any field of endeavor, become highly successful, much less get to the very top?

Guest blogger Ron Cooper, author of Purple Jesus

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I fell in love with literature when I read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The backwoods Bundren family—some hard-working and honorable, some shiftless and depraved, and all dirt poor—were my people. I had never imagined that penniless and often clueless clodhoppers could be proper subjects for respectable art. I found that such characters surfaced in the work of other, usually Southern, authors, like Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Erskine Caldwell. The fictive world occupied by O’Connor’s and Welty’s characters were familiar to me, but they were not the destitute and often violent milieu of Faulkner and especially Caldwell. These authors all understood something about poor people, although only Caldwell seemed especially to care for them. In the years after being awakened to literature by Faulkner, I discovered many writers I admired, but I wondered why nearly all of them wrote only about socio-economically privileged characters.