How to write dialogue is one of the first things a budding storyteller can master with just a bit of practice and effort. That's not to say that writing dialogue is easy- it's not. But, once you realize the purpose of dialogue in a story and hone in on all those pesky formatting rules, it can become intuitive. With a little bit of focused and consistent practice, you'll be in a flow state before you know it! You'll be cranking out conversations that sound natural, serve a purpose, and are entertaining as hell!
Links of the week July 27 2020 (31)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
3 August 2020
Like everything, though, before you nail your dialogue, you've got to know the fundamentals. You can't play Moonlight Sonata if you know where middle C is - know what I mean? Don't worry though, because that's precisely what we are going to cover in this post! The fundamentals of writing dialogue. How to format dialogue, what proper tags to use, and the overall purpose of dialogue in your story. Then I'll take you through seven easy steps to writing your dialogue scene. Let's get started!
Grandmother did most of her work in bed. She had a special tray with folding legs that served as a desk. She would sit up against a stack of pillows, with a cashmere cardigan over her nightdress, and write longhand on loose sheets of foolscap. Pots of tea were ferried to her by my grandfather, who would have been fully dressed in a tweed jacket and tie and working from his study downstairs. All the men in my family had a study or office, and worked jobs with regular hours; unlike Grandmother, who would break off from her writing to dig in the garden or peel the spuds for dinner.
Of course, women's lives have always been dominated by the needs of others. Surveys of the division of labour during the lockdown revealed - to the surprise of nobody - that women still ended up performing the vast majority of housework and caring duties. Female writers, no less today than in my grandmother's day, must find a way of working amid all this noise, and they do. Anne Lamott famously said that, before she had a child, she couldn't write if there were dishes in the sink - but afterwards she could write if there was a corpse in the sink.
With Labor Day only five weeks away, it has become clear that a substantial number of publishers, both in New York City and elsewhere, will not be returning to their offices in anything resembling full force before 2021. Moreover, organizers of a few industry events set for early next year have already announced they will be moving them from in-person to online. PubWest, for one, announced that its annual conference, originally planned for February 4-6 in Denver, will be virtual.
In a PW survey of New York City publishers in early June, most anticipated that they would begin bringing their employees back to their offices shortly after Labor Day. That is not the case now. Naperville, Ill.-based Sourcebooks was the first publisher to announce it is giving its staff the option to work remotely until January. Macmillan announced that its office at 120 Broadway in New York will officially open on or after Jan. 11, 2021. In the interim, beginning August 3, the company is offering limited early access to its Downtown Manhattan office, on a trial basis, for employees who have requested it.
When I started writing my current novel, Paris Never Leaves You, I had no idea the protagonist, a young widow struggling to survive in Occupied Paris, would end up working in a New York publishing house. I knew she would get to America, but I assumed she would enter the fashion or beauty business as had many of the émigrés I'd known or read about who fled Europe after World War II. But the character who began to take shape in my mind was having none of it.
Strange as it may seem, writers pray for recalcitrant characters who refuse to follow the author's dictates. They usually turn out to be better company for the writer and, one hopes, for the reader. The daughter of a French publisher, my protagonist, Charlotte Foret, had run a bookshop in Paris. Now she was determined to find work in a publishing house in New York.
As I look back on the writing process, I have no idea which came first - the logic of her continuing in the same field or my memories of working in a New York publishing house several decades after she did. I do know, however, that once I began writing about her days at a fictional house, which I called Gibbon and Field, my memories became increasingly vivid.
Thabiso Mahlape is the founder of Blackbird Books in South Africa, an independent publishing house that is dedicated to giving young black writers a platform (www.blackbirdbooks.africa)... In between juggling submissions, proofs and sales, Mahlape is a columnist: she writes regularly for the Sowetan newspaper and has contributed to magazines such a Destiny and VISI. As a writer and a speaker, her focus is largely on self-development, body politics and what it means to be a black woman in South Africa.
Now that I am independent, I want to turn this into THE literary gateway into Africa. What I mean by this is that at the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. there were lots of people actively looking for African writers and content. But successful African works usually had an element of northern influence - they were by people who had left Africa to go to the UK/USA. My vision for this publishing house is that Africans need to define and be settled with what African content is. It will be a platform where authors are not asked to conform or shy away from ideas because they are not palatable to someone who was not in Africa. It will be African stories by Africans and for the world.
Before the stay-at-home orders came down in Baltimore, the last thing I did in person was participate in a panel conversation about-ironically-"art and the apocalypse." In retrospect, we should have cancelled, but the threat in Maryland still felt surreal; those were the days when it seemed like we could beat the pandemic by washing our hands.
I've been thinking about that panel a lot lately because my first novel is coming out in August, and I've been trying to envision a book launch without an in-person event. I'm embarrassed to be grieving for this tiny problem, which is less than negligible compared to all we have witnessed this year. But publishing a novel has been a lifelong dream for me, and book events have been an important part of that dream-because other authors' events have been such meaningful parts of my own inspiration.
As much of the retail world faces crisis, book publishing is positioned to grow in terms of unit sales when compared to 2019. In fact, 2020 may prove to be one of the strongest sales years in recent memory.
A few factors are likely contributing to the resilience of sales:
- the prevalence of online purchasing in the US market (driven by Amazon, of course)
- the strength of Ingram's print-on-demand operations in the US-and the overall robustness of the US supply chain thus far
- the current events/bestseller effect, with race relations and politics driving high sales of titles such as White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, John Bolton's The Room Where It Happened, and Mary Trump's Too Much and Never Enough. (Outperforming titles can bring a book category into a growth position or soften-even turn around-a decline for the market.)
- the high adoption rate of ebooks and audiobooks in the US market prior to the pandemic
- the migration of print sales to big-box retailers, as written about by the New York Times.
Let's dig deeper into what's happening
When Stephenie Meyer decided this year to release "Midnight Sun," a retelling of her best-selling "Twilight" novel from the vampire's point of view, she thought: "No one can possibly care about it anymore."
She put the book on hold after several chapters leaked online in 2008. Now, more than a decade later, her legions of fans will finally be able to read it. She had hoped for a low-key release, but when she announced the publication date in May, so many of them flocked to her website that it quickly crashed.
"That's really flattering but also nerve-racking," Meyer said in an interview last month. "I'm pretty sure people aren't going to get exactly what they think they're getting. Because of all the time that's passed, they've built up in their minds what they thought it was going to be, and so no one can live up to those kinds of expectations."
Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola have won the Waterstones children's book prize for their "utterly joyful" picture book about a science-loving black girl, Look Up!, at a time when only 4% of British children's books contain a black or minority ethnic main character.
Following the adventures of Rocket, a little girl who is trying to convince her phone-obsessed teenage brother to look up at a meteor shower, Look Up! was named winner of the £5,000 award, chosen by Waterstones booksellers, on Thursday.
Bryon, a writer and actor, came up with the story after visiting Hyde Park in London with his girlfriend to see the Peter Pan statue. While there, he spent the whole time refreshing his phone. He originally intended the work to be a short animation, but was convinced by his agent to try writing a book instead. "Long story short, after a tax bill came through I was like, 'I need to learn how to write books.' So I went to Waterstones and studied the hell out of some picture books," he said.
27 July 2020
Deduced from my somewhat limited study of people I've met in airports and at Belt events, about 82 percent of Americans think they have a good idea for a book.
Now, it's definitely a very feel-good and motivational thing to say everyone has a book in them, but I do not believe this. (I also do not think everyone has a movie in them, or a restaurant, or a surgery, or whatever other activity requiring expertise people assume they could totally do). I do think everyone has a good essay in them, though. Belt's city anthology series, books containing dozens of essays about a city, often written by people who have never published before, bears this out to a certain extent.
Many nonwriters who are sure they have a great book idea-but (sorry to say) do not-are not thinking about their idea as one within a marketplace of other ideas. They are-and I do not mean this in a nasty way, but a technical one-thinking selfishly. They are thinking about how fascinating their grandfather who fought in World War II is, or how interesting their own divorce has been. And that's fine! It may be there is a fascinating history or memoir there. But if you have an idea for a book, the key question is not about whether a topic is interesting to you, but whether or not someone might want to spend thousands of dollars on this idea to make it into a physical object for readers. And the answer to that question lies in whether or not others might want to spend money to read it.
Before I was a writer, I worked in publishing. I started out as an editorial assistant in a publishing house in New York before working at a literary agency in London, where I spent a decade as a translation rights agent. For five years, I both wrote and worked, squeezing in the writing on nights and weekends.
The transition from publishing to author - which isn't all that uncommon - can sometimes feel like a dirty little secret. It can seem like cronyism, as if we're all members of an elite clubhouse passing around favours to each other.
And in some ways, that rings true. My agent was a close friend long before I roped her into representing me. I've gone on business trips with the woman who sells my translation rights.
Full disclosure: I may not be the right person to answer the question posed in this headline. After all, I wrote my first novel almost entirely from bed. In fact, I am writing this essay from bed now. Like Edith Wharton, Colette, and Proust, I am more creative when reclined, and when comfortable, and when alone. This is only to say, I don't write in public spaces. Public spaces are the opposite of my bed.
But plenty of writers swear by them. The café, in particular, has long been a popular place to write; so popular that it has acquired a thick air of nostalgia and romance that threatens to obscure its actual value. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir famously used Paris's Café de Flore as their home office; as Sartre explained, "We settled there: from nine o'clock in the morning to noon, we worked there, we went to lunch, at two o'clock we came back and we talked with friends that we met until eight o'clock. We received the people we had arranged to meet, it may seem strange, but we were at Flore at home."
True crime is having a moment. But then, one could say true crime has been having a moment for more than three centuries, since the New England-based minister Cotton Mather published his execution sermons for eager Puritan audiences, then, with an altogether different pamphlet, laid the groundwork for the Salem Witch Trials in 1692.
Lately, it's felt different. More highbrow. More participatory. More investigative. More in the public interest. More reflective, critical, even postmodern. The current state of the genre has broadened far past stories once reliably contained within the pages of mass-market paperbacks, covers with dripping fonts. Or tabloid-friendly tales slickly packaged into programs that air on Investigation Discovery, Oxygen, and Lifetime.
Critically acclaimed author Irenosen Okojie has won the AKO Caine prize for African writing, crediting her win with giving her "extra confidence" as a black, female experimental writer who has felt she was "operating on the fringes".
The Nigerian-British writer won the £10,000 award on Monday afternoon for her short story Grace Jones, following an impersonator of the singer as she mourns the death of her family in a house fire. Judges for the prize called it "a radical story that plays with logic, time and place", and praised it as "risky, dazzling, imaginative and bold".
"I write weird experimental fiction. And I think it's really important to centre experimental fiction by a black woman like myself, because for a long time, I felt like I was operating on the fringes. People were often quite surprised by my writing, just in terms of subject matter and style," she said. "When we talk about what's an African story, stories like mine show it's really diverse and varied."
The British Civil Wars of the mid-17th century are my passion. This extraordinary period has everything: epic battles, espionage and adventure, the only trial and execution of a monarch, and radical constitutional experiments, all documented by newspapers and pamphlets in the "first age of journalism". This is a paradise for lovers of the written word: oceans of ink spilled in a war fought not over who should rule, but how they should rule. It is grown-up history: the messiest, most complicated corner of Britain's past; the blot on the timeline; the gap in our neat story of kings and queens.
I am a historian specialising in Oliver Cromwell and his Protectorate - the period when he and then his son ruled Britain as kings in all but name before the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. But beyond the textbooks, it has always been the people of the Civil Wars and their stories that engaged me. As a child I was captivated by the characters in The Children of the New Forest and Lorna Doone: people of such passion, commitment and bravery who put their hearts and souls into this seismic clash of ideas, risking everything they had for an intangible cause.
A group of more than 80 science fiction and fantasy authors are protesting at the possibility of one of the genres' biggest conventions being held in Saudi Arabia in 2022, saying that "the Saudi regime is antithetical to everything SFF stands for".
Led by fantasy author Anna Smith Spark,writers including Charles Stross, Juliet McKenna, Stan Nicholls and Catriona Ward have signed an open letter objecting to Jeddah's bid to host the World Science Fiction Convention in two years' time.
WorldCon, where the winners of the prestigious Hugo awards are announced, has been running every year since 1946, with members of the WSFS voting for each year's location, and for the Hugo winners. This year's event will take place, virtually, in New Zealand on Saturday, with next year's lined up for Washington DC. As well as Jeddah, a bid for 2022 has been submitted by Chicago.
While the writers acknowledge that holding the convention in Jeddah would "open up a new world to fans who may otherwise never have an opportunity to travel there, and show solidarity with creative communities within Saudi Arabia and other Arab states",they state that "the Saudi regime is antithetical to everything SFF stands for".
As hard as it may be to believe, not too long ago, it was actually quite difficult to sell a book about Donald Trump. When investigative journalist David Cay Johnston sought a publisher for a biography shortly after Trump descended his golden escalator and announced his plans to seek the Republican nomination, he couldn't get anyone to bite. "I tried to do a book when Donald announced in June of 2015, and Alice Martell, my literary agent, called around," Johnston told Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/ in 2016. "But nobody believed he would get the nomination, so nobody wanted the book." After Trump prevailed in the Republican presidential primary, two biographies were published-Johnston's The Making of Donald Trump and The Washington Post's Trump Revealed, both bestsellers.
Still, it wasnt until Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton that the floodgates finally opened. Now the publishing industry is awash with Trump bestsellers. Everyone is sick of Donald Trump, and nobody can stop reading about him.