White Space: dialogue and the art of writing between the lines

Art is not life. Normal conversations don’t read well on the page – it would be excruciating to forge through all the ums and huhs that fill our day to day — so written dialogue becomes a kind of bookmark, something that tells the reader where s/he is as efficiently as possible. It is also the one place the writer can vanish into full Oz mode, letting the characters speak for themselves. Because of that, dialogue can and should be the most exciting part of any story: the writer can finally be free of the burden of narrating and experience the joy of hearing his or her characters speak for themselves. However, dialogue is also often the most frustrating to write and revise. In this workshop we will dissect examples of dialogue from playwrights, short story writers, and novelists and discuss them until we reach a clearer understanding of their workings. We will put our learning into use with a few exercises, and emerge from our time together with a greater sense of purpose and, I hope, delight around dialogue.

Aria Sloss is a graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Iowa Arts Foundation, the Yaddo Corporation, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her writing has appeared in “Glimmer Train”, the “Harvard Review”, and online at “The Paris Review” and “Five Chapters”. The title story from her new story collection, THE CURE, was in the winter 2019 Ploughshares. She working on a new novel, LITTLE MONSTER, about a child prodigy.