Category Archives: dialogue
3rd scene from my memoir
On a cold morning in late winter I’m driving home to the farm after a Friday breakfast date in town with Kathy. The Muslim students are returning to kill six lambs. This is Islam’s highest holy day, the Festival of … Continue reading
The semicolon: love it; or hate it
Learn to use the semicolon. Master it. And then never use it again.—Verlyn Klinkenborg, in a lecture to MFA students at Goucher College Kurt Vonnegut also hated the semicolon. Virginia Woolf was at the other end of the scale, of … Continue reading
Filed under dialogue, punctuation, syntax
Almost Christmas at the coffee shop
Middle-aged men, two to four in the group, one talking loudly at a time: “You need to read more books!” “How are we going to solve the health care problem if . . .” “What gets me is these Republicans … Continue reading
Filed under creative nonfiction, dialogue, essay-narrative, evolutionary psychology, MY LIFE, politics, scene
Honesty and chronology, part two
William Zinsser addresses the issue of fidelity to chronology in his On Writing Well, and I was surprised by his answer. Perusing the thirtieth anniversary edition of this sober classic on nonfiction, I expected Zinsser to be very conservative in … Continue reading
That old fly on the wall
“Dialogue for me is the most effective and most interesting way of defining character, making it unnecessary for the writer to intrude with any song-and-dance routine of his own,” explains literary journalist Lillian Ross in Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism. … Continue reading
Filed under dialogue, fiction, flow, journalism, NOTED, point of view, syntax
