George Saunders has said, “Bad dialogue is when A asks a question and B answers it.” Good dialogue is like two people “firing missiles past each other.” Dialogue, he says, can be “like poetry.” On a narrative level, it can complicate dramatic tension. It can deepen or stymie your characters’ relationship(s), and expose even those biases and secrets unknown to the himself. On the level of pacing and stucture, dialogue can be a useful tool for manipulating narrative time. And yet, while we chatty creatures might feel as though dialogue should come naturally on the page, it is often in passages of dialogue that a writer’s weaknesses are most exposed. Zadie Smith avoided writing dialogue for many years. Nabokov was against it completely.
This 4-week intensive will begin with an examination of the aesthetic impulse to avoid dialogue before moving into a deep examination of what it can achieve. Through close readings from sources as varied as novels, stories, craft essays, and our own text messages and phone conversations (anonymized or obtained with the consent of our interlocutors, of course!), we will investigate and test a range of the form’s variegations of style and purpose. Weekly in-class writing exercises will focus, firstly, on generating new material, freeing our characters to speak their way into unexpected complexity, balancing verisimilitude with emotional incisiveness; and, secondly, on revision, transforming ordinary exchanges into moments of revelation, and polishing our dialogue into something vivid, useful, and alive.
This is a craft course. Our craft courses analyze fiction from a craft perspective and include generative writing exercises. Class will meet once a week for a live Zoom lecture based on the assigned reading. There will also be writing prompts and discussion prompts.