The Fiction Writer's Guide to Dialogue: A Fresh Look at an Essential Ingredient of the Craft

Description

Dialogue is often overlooked as a necessary and potent instrument in the novelist's repertoire. A novel can rise or fall on the strength of its dialogue. Superb dialogue can make a superb novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "Action is character." George V. Higgins said, "Dialogue is character." They were both right, because dialogue is action. It comprises much, if not all, of the clarifying drama of any novel. How much physical action can there be in 300 pages, even in a crime novel or a thriller? And all conflict, even physical, begins as dialogue. Hough explains how dialogue can reveal a character's nature as well as his or her defining impulses and emotions. He says there must be tension in every colloquy in fiction, and shows the reader ways to achieve it. Hough illustrates his precepts with examples from his own work and from that of the best modern writers of dialogue, including Cormac McCarthy, Kent Haruf, Joan Didion, Annie Proulx, Lee Smith, Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins, William Kennedy and Howard Frank Mosher.

John Hough, Jr. grew up on Cape Cod and graduated from Haverford College. He is the author of six novels, including Seen the Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Gettysburg, winner of the 2010 W. Y. Boyd Aware for excellence in military fiction from the American Library Association, and Little Bighorn (Arcade 2014). Mr. Hough teaches creative writing at his home on Martha's Vineyard and in the island's Adult Community Education program. For many years he taught dialogue at SEAK, Inc. fiction writing conferences. He lives with his wife in West Tisbury.

"Terrific. Hough has caught the spirit of young enlisted men in the army, and has done a splendid job of research on the Twentieth Massachusetts to get its role in the Gettysburg campaign right. It is a great read." James M. McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era "It reads as if you were there. Captures the chaos, excitement, brutality and nature of the battle as well as anyone has. It is the way I think a soldier in combat saw it." Scott Hartwig, Gettysburg Battlefield Historian "Just when you think there are no new stories under the sun about the Civil War-here it comes! John Hough looks at the theme of race and the battle of Gettysburg from a strikingly different angle. Join up and go to war with these boys from the Vineyard; you won't be able to catch your breath until this fast, brilliant novel is over. Seen the Glory is an original, profound novel, with the best dialogue of the period I have ever read." Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill, Fair and Tender Ladies, and Oral History "John Hough has created a true American story, truer than our collective memory has allowed until now. For that reason it deepens our understanding of the waste and tragedy of the Civil War-and the challenge for us of living out its complicated legacy." Lorene Cary, author of Black Ice and The Price of a Child "Terrific. Hough has caught the spirit of young enlisted men in the army, and has done a splendid job of research on the Twentieth Massachusetts to get its role in the Gettysburg campaign right. It is a great read." James M. McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era "It reads as if you were there. Captures the chaos, excitement, brutality and nature of the battle as well as anyone has. It is the way I think a soldier in combat saw it." Scott Hartwig, Gettysburg Battlefield Historian "Just when you think there are no new stories under the sun about the Civil War-here it comes! John Hough looks at the theme of race and the battle of Gettysburg from a strikingly different angle. Join up and go to war with these boys from the Vineyard; you won't be able to catch your breath until this fast, brilliant novel is over. Seen the Glory is an original, profound novel, with the best dialogue of the period I have ever read." Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill, Fair and Tender Ladies, and Oral History "John Hough has created a true American story, truer than our collective memory has allowed until now. For that reason it deepens our understanding of the waste and tragedy of the Civil War-and the challenge for us of living out its complicated legacy." Lorene Cary, author of Black Ice and The Price of a Child