Instititute of Children's Literature

Rx for Writers

Transcripts

"Dialogue that Makes a Difference" with Sandy Asher

Thursday, May 24, 2001

Moderator is Kristi Holl, author of 24 juvenile novels and 150+ articles, as well as the web editor for this site and writing teacher for 15 years.

Sandy is Sandy Asher, author of 20 books for young readers, including her latest picture book, Stella's Dancing Days. Her three dozen plays have earned her many national awards. Sandy has also edited two anthologies and is Writer-in-Residence at Drury University.

Names color coded in blue are viewers who asked questions.

Interviews are held on Thursday nights: 9-11 p.m. ATLANTIC/CANADA, 8-10 p.m. Eastern, 7-9 Central, 6-8 Mountain, and 5-7 Pacific

Moderator: Hello, everyone! It's good to be here tonight with Sandy Asher, who will be talking about "Dialogue that Makes a Difference." I'm Kristi Holl, your moderator and the web editor for this site. Sandy Asher has made excellent use of dialogue in her 20 books for young readers and in the three dozen plays that have earned her many national awards. What's the attraction of dialogue, and how can we writers use it most effectively? Sandy's going to be talking about that tonight. Welcome, Sandy. I'm so glad you're here!

Sandy: Thank you, Kristi! I'm delighted to be here!

Moderator: Sandy, I've known you nearly twenty years, since we were both writing our earliest novels. When did you begin writing plays too?

Sandy: It's not a matter of writing plays "too," Kristi. I began writing plays long before I ever thought about writing novels, way back in second grade, when I used to make up plays and boss my friends around and make them act them out with me! Later, I published plays and magazine stories, poems, and articles. The novels actually came last.

Moderator: I know you just got back from collecting the IUPUI/Bonderman National Playwriting Award in Indianapolis. Can you tell us what that was for?

Sandy: I'd be pleased to! There were five plays chosen for development and staged readings at the Bonderman Symposium. My play is called "In the Garden of the Selfish Giant." It was inspired by Oscar Wilde's story, "The Selfish Giant," but it's not an adaptation. It's a modern-dress, four character one-act about grandmother/mother/child relationships, friendship, life and death!

Moderator: Wow! That covers a lot! Our topic for the evening is "Dialogue that Makes a Difference." Sandy, why is dialogue so compelling to readers?

Sandy: We're born eavesdroppers! We love to listen in on other's conversations. It begins in infancy, and it keeps on going when we grow up. If people shout in a crowded room, we all listen up. If they begin to whisper we listen even harder! It's a human impulse -- to see what's up in others' lives.

Moderator: What if dialogue is hard for a writer, if it doesn't come naturally? Are there techniques that are helpful for writing better dialogue?

Sandy: Certainly. And practice, practice, practice is one of them! Practice eavesdropping! Practice reading aloud the dialogue you admire in other people's writing. Practice reading play scripts out loud! Think about how you learned to use dialogue the first time as an infant. You listened, you imitated, you experimented and then you began trying over and over again the things you found worked for you: Mama! Cookie! No! Why? That's exactly how we learn to write dialogue: Listen, try it, experiment with it, see what works, practice using it.

Moderator: In the average story, what is a good balance between narration and dialogue? 50/50?

Sandy: I wish I had that formula, Kristi, but I don't. Each story has its own best balance. But one thing we can keep in mind is that a lot of dialogue tends to lighten the story, to move it along faster, while a larger ratio of narration to dialogue will slow things down, make them more thoughtful perhaps, more serious. Sometimes that's exactly what a story needs, so striving for a "perfect" balance means striving for the perfect balance for the story at hand.

SaraJ: How much dialogue is TOO much? Can you have too much in a story?

Sandy: Hi, Sara. Again, it simply depends on the story -- and whether or not the dialogue is serving the story well. There's too much dialogue when the reader is getting bored with it or when the dialogue is going nowhere, just pointless chatter that isn't advancing the action in any way.

lodger: Some authors claim that they write "snippets of overheard conversation" in their notebooks for later use. Do you do that? And if so, can you give a sample of overheard conversation that you have found useful?

Sandy: I'm not the world's greatest journaler, lodger, so I don't often do that, although others do and it serves them well. I tend to hear things and think about the interesting way they were said or the unusual way the speaker has of saying them. For instance, I heard someone speaking with heavy emphasis on each and every word the other day, with giant pauses between each word. "Can...you...imagine...that!" That'll stick in my memory, and may come in handy for a character some day. But what I do is listen to the character, really get a voice going in my head that matches the picture I have of her or him, and then that character speaks and I just write it down! I can tell when the character says something "uncharacteristic," too, which they'll sometimes do.

BigSkyBoy: Seems like maybe it is not the amount of dialogue, but the connection between the participants in the dialogue. Fair?

Sandy: The connection, yes, BigSkyBoy, in that it's all about what the two of them want from one another, why are they speaking, what are they trying to accomplish by speaking -- and what does that have to do with the story I'm trying to tell?

Moderator: Sandy, you've written award-winning plays as well as fiction. Is writing dialogue for plays different than writing dialogue for stories and novels? If so, how?

Sandy: It's certainly related, but it is different. In a play, you have pretty much nothing else to rely on except for dialogue and action. The sets, costumes, lighting, music, etc., can only do so much. If the dialogue and the forward movement of the plot -- the action -- isn't working, there's nothing to be done! In a story, you can give the character's thoughts, you can fill in narration and commentary on all of that in a variety of ways.

Mom of 3: How does punctuation in plays differ from punctuation in a story?

Sandy: Punctuation is punctuation, Mom of 3, and it's pretty much the same for both. The difference is in how the language is laid out on the page, with the characters' names either to one side or centered above the dialogue. There are no quotation marks, unless the character is quoting someone else.

Moderator: How does dialogue serve the "Show, Don't Tell" commandment?

Sandy: It's one of the best techniques available for showing rather than telling. It's the difference between going to a party and staying home and hearing about it from someone else! Dialogue puts you right into the scene, listening to the conversation.

Moderator: Let's talk about the uses of dialogue. It often does double and triple duty, with the same conversation accomplishing a number of things. First, as you mentioned, dialogue produces a sense of immediacy, of "being there" for the reader. How does it do that -- and why is that important?

Sandy: You're right there, listening to the characters speak and drawing your own conclusions. For instance, if you "tell" about anger, you might say, "Karen was really angry with her mom." Okay, so Karen is angry, so what? But if you show that anger through dialogue, you get the two of them talking: "You can't run my life," Karen said. "You speak to me like that one more time, young lady, and you can kiss those car keys good-bye. I told you never to speak to that boy again -- not in the street, not at school, not even in church! Do you hear me?" Okay, so now we know a whole lot about these two -- without being "told" anything at all. We've heard it for ourselves.

Moderator: How can dialogue be used to believably convey a sense of setting?

Sandy: Let your characters talk about the setting -- if talking about it makes sense for them within your story. For instance: "Would ya just take a look at those roses! I've never seen anything like them before. What do ya call that color? Kinda light orange?" "It's called Peaches and Cream. Mrs. Smythe does love her roses and I'm sure she'd appreciate your enjoying them."

Moderator: Dialogue delineates character in so many ways. Can you name some and give examples?

Sandy: Well, I think from the above conversation you can tell that one of the two speakers is a bit more restrained and cultured than the other. The way we talk reveals a great deal about each of us, not only our levels of education, but our heritage, our area of the country, our interests, our enthusiasms, our emotions.

Moderator: We know that dialogue can also advance the plot. But how? Isn't plot usually the narration?

Sandy: Not always! What characters say to one another -- or fail to say to one another -- drives the plot in one direction or the other. My favorite example of that is a line I had in a production of "Macbeth" way back in college. I came on at a crucial moment and announced, "The queen, my lord, is dead." And everything that happened thereafter sprang from that line of dialogue. What if I'd come on one night and said, "The queen, my lord, has left you for another man!"

SaraJ: If you wanted to show a character trait (like being a liar) should you do it in the dialogue (show her lying) and let the reader figure out she's a liar? (or smart, or compassionate, or whatever)

Sandy: If you want the reader to believe your character is a liar, it's wise to show that character lying. Otherwise, the reader has only your word for it, and that's not always reliable. Say you were going on a blind date and the friend who was setting you up told you the guy was really funny. Well, he could be Woody Allen funny, or Donald Duck funny, or Bozo the Clown funny. Not until you actually heard what he had to say and the way he said it would you understand what the word "funny" really meant.

Moderator: What are some ways you can use dialogue to create tension in a story?

Sandy: Sara had a good idea with the character lying and the reader knowing he or she is lying, but there are other ways as well. One character waiting and hoping for a certain something to be said that may never get said. And arguments, of course. You want your characters to argue! Conflict, after all, is what stories are all about.

Moderator: What about theme? Can dialogue further your theme without being preachy or moralizing?

Sandy: Dialogue is an excellent way to further your theme without being preachy or moralizing because your characters are the ones drawing the thematic conclusions rather than you, as narrator, stepping in to lecture your readers on what this story is really all about! For instance, one character saying to another, "I can't begin to tell you how much your friendship means to me" is far more effective than a line of narrative that announces that friendship is important to us all.

bernie: What about interior dialogue? Characters talking to themselves aloud? Should that type of dialogue be used sparingly?

Sandy: Again, bernie, every story creates its own set of rules, so anything I say here is not a hard and fast rule for all occasions. If you set up a believable situation where a character talks to himself or herself -- and it's entertaining, and it fits that character, and it moves the plot forward in a satisfying way, it's going to work.

Moderator: I am going to post three questions now in a row because they are similar...

MBVoelker: How can you best suggest a regional accent, a speech impediment, a higher or lower level of education, a rural or urban origin, or such characteristics without going overboard and driving yourself and your reader crazy?

lodger: How do you handle dialects? Do you try to spell out how a Texan might say something, or a Londoner, or someone from Boston? Or if your character has a foreign accent, what do you do to make it sound right for the reader?

JAMES55CLINTON: Is there a line you draw between dialect and regional or ethnic ridicule?

Sandy: Okay, group! This is a tough one, because people do speak differently from one another and yet issues of political correctness will come up, for better or worse. The first question to ask oneself, it seems to me, is: Why am I using this type of dialect? (Or whatever the "different" thing is.) If you're using it because it's absolutely true to the character and it means something in this particular story, then you're probably okay with it. Otherwise, if you're using it just to show how clever you are or because it strikes you funny, or for some other frivolous reason, then you're probably in danger of stereotyping or ridiculing or some other public offense! Once you've established that this unusual way of speaking is germane to your story it becomes an artistic question. It really is annoying to read a page full of odd spellings. A more graceful way of doing it is to indicate the difference as subtly and with as little embellishment as possible. For instance, I have a dear friend from Latvia who actually has almost no accent at all, except that she continues in the Latvian tradition of eliminating all articles. She lives, in other words, in United States of America. Notice how odd that already sounds -- and all I did is leave out one word: "the."

Moderator: What's the most effective way to use tag lines?

Sandy: As unobtrusively as possible! We don't actually read those tag lines, you know? We just kind of glance at them to make sure we understand who is speaking. So the quicker the glance we have to take, the happier we are, because we can get right back to the dialogue itself. Also, you don't want to make the mistake of depending on those tag lines to do the dialogue's work for you. "Hello," she said angrily is not good enough! "Hey, creep!" is what you really may mean.

Moderator: What about the "Thesaurus Syndrome" in tag lines? (he vocalized, she expounded, he quavered)

Sandy: Terrific examples of exactly what you don't want to do! The tag lines should never draw attention to themselves. They're there to identify the speakers, and to add details when the dialogue itself is open to misinterpretation, as in "I love you." Could be sincere, but could be a lie. So "I love you," he said sounds sincere enough, but "I love you," he said, and choked on the third word might give a different impression entirely.

Moderator: Can you instead use simple tags like "said" and "asked," but make them more specific with adverbs? (he said angrily, she asked softly, etc.)

Sandy: Ah, these are known in the trade as "Tom Swifties," I believe because they're used so much in the old Tom Swift novels. Again, try as hard as you can to get the dialogue to do the work. Only when all else fails do you modify it with adverbs and phrases to explain what it really means.

bernie: How about dialogue personality quirks or tags, certain phrases or words particular to certain characters? Is it wise to use them in developing characters and dialogue?

Sandy: It often is very effective, bernie. Some characters, for instance, might drop the beginning of phrases, as in "Don't know how I feel about that." Again, a little goes a long way. When the reader feels he or she is bumping up against that "tag" too often, sympathy for the character and interest in the story tends to evaporate.

Moderator: When can you leave out the tag lines altogether so the dialogue reads more smoothly?

Sandy: When there are only two people in the scene talking to one another, you can go a pretty long time without tag lines at all. You might, instead of a tag line, have one character use the others' name and that reminds the reader of who's speaking at the moment and who's there listening. But as soon as a third character enters the scene, you pretty well have to use the tag lines to keep everything straight. The one thing you don't want to have happen is that the reader has to stop and go back to figure out who's talking to whom. Readers don't care for that at all!

Moderator: What's the best position for tag lines? Should they always come first so we know who is talking? (e.g. Mom asked, "Where's your homework?")

Sandy: Variety is the spice of life, in this as in everything else. They can occasionally come first, and in a burst of short exchanges, come last, as well. In a very long speech, though, you want to identify the speaker as early as possible, at the first convenient break: "Four score and seven years ago," the President said so that the reader doesn't get half a page down only to learn that he or she has been imagining the wrong speaker all this time.

red2: Is it acceptable to follow dialogue with descriptions of facial expressions, etc. or should the reader be able to draw these conclusions by dialogue alone?

Sandy: Good question, red2, because it brings up an important point. The first objective is to make the dialogue do its own work, but you also don't want to get so enchanted with your own dialogue that you forget to add the human bodies from which it's springing. This is sometimes jokingly called "The Floating Head Syndrome" because there seems to be a whole lot of talking going on, but nobody there to do it! So, yes, it is okay to occasionally drop in what the characters are doing with the rest of their bodies, as well as where they're doing it: "Got any gum?" Joey asked. He dug the point of his pencil into the heart he'd already carved on the edge of his desk. Okay, so we know Joey's talking in school, he's about to break a rule, and he's also a destroyer of public property!

BigSkyBoy: If your speaker sniffs or coughs or is identified in that paragraph, is that going to replace a "he said" tag?

Sandy: Your speaker can be identified with an action instead of a tag line -- absolutely. That's a good way to add variety: Joey leaned across the aisle and shoved his face right next to mine. "Got any gum?"

MBVoelker: How do you express tone of voice when it's pertinent? When a person is being sarcastic or ironic for example.

Sandy: It would be ideal if you could get the sarcasm or irony right into the dialogue or you might need to combine dialogue with action to get the effect you want: "Great dress!" she said, and rolled her eyes heavenward. That's maybe not the best example ever, coming right off the top of my head, but you get the idea. Better to show than to tell with a "she said sarcastically" tag line.

menucha: What about just going on to a description immediately after your character finishes speaking like: "Come over here now!" Mother was angry!

Sandy: I'd need to see a good reason for doing that. It's quite possible to have one, because the story in some way calls for that kind of emphasis, but in general, showing is all you need. In writing for very young children, it might be necessary to underscore the showing with a little telling, but we generally trust the reader to "get it" and the reader generally trusts us to believe he or she will indeed get it.

MBVoelker: If a character speaks, performs an action, then continues speaking is it OK to keep it in the same paragraph if you have no other reason to start a new paragraph or do you have to start a new paragraph for each piece of dialogue even if it's the same speaker? This is a long standing dispute I have with a friend and neither of us has ever been able to prove one way or another from a grammar book.

Sandy: The rule is that you change paragraphs with each change of speaker, not with each new line of dialogue spoken by the same speaker. So the answer is yes, it's fine, in fact preferable, to stay in the same paragraph if a speaker speaks, acts, and continues speaking.

BigSkyBoy: If, for example, you use the word "No," how can the reader hear the tone (glibly, defiantly, shyly, unsure, angry) without the adverb?

Sandy: Ah, another opportunity to bring in another important area to consider. Thank you, BigSkyBoy. The answer is context. Dialogue doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's spoken between two or more characters, and it's spoken because something has happened or is happening that they need to vocalize about. So if Mom says, "Brush your teeth" once and the answer is "No," we can assume that it's a pretty rebellious answer. If Mom says "Brush your teeth" several times and the answer continues to be "No," we can assume that both Mom's command and the response are getting louder and more intense with each repetition.

Moderator: How can you tell if your dialogue is "dead wood" in your story? We need a good balance of dialogue in our fiction, but how can you tell if it's just filler?

Sandy: This is the test that I give to dialogue, description, sensory details of all sorts: Is it important to this character at this moment in this story? If so it needs to be in there. If not it's just filler. "I got a B in math!" might be really good news to Susie and to her parents as well. But if the story has nothing to do with her math grade, we don't need to hear about it right now. Susie may be telling the writer that there's a tale to be told about her math grade. I do listen to my characters and pay attention to what's on their minds! But if it doesn't belong in this story it goes in the idea file to wait for another time.

SaraJ: If you know that you need to add more dialogue to a scene, how can you think of something that really needs to be there and isn't "filler"?

Sandy: Personally, I'd ask my characters that question. What do they need to say just now? What have I said in narration that they could say better all by themselves? If you're thinking "I need to add more dialogue to this seen," I believe that there are two things going on: First, that you're looking at a really dark spot on your page, lines and lines of heavy-going narration, and second, that you're not listening to your characters. You're moving them around rather than letting them move the story for you. Sometimes I just need to relax and let my characters talk to one another. I actually forget about "writing the story" and just type lines of dialogue, recording what they say to one another in my head, without pushing them to say anything in particular. Eventually, they get back to the story -- and they "show it" rather than my "telling it." Those are great times, by the way, when the characters just take over and let me be their secretary. If I write "Nancy was angry," I then have to search around for what happens next. But if Nancy says, "I hate your stinking guts!" the person she's saying it to is going to say something back -- and I'll just get carried along for the ride!

BigSkyBoy: Can your story spring from free rambling dialogue during the writing, or is this a waste and best to have the story structure figured out before going to the keyboard?

Sandy: Free, rambling dialogue has saved me many a time. I may have thought I had the story structure pretty well figured out, but it somehow gets itself bogged down and then just typing those lines of dialogue until the characters figure out where they want to go is the very best medicine for the what ails me! And listening to the characters has taken me to a better place than I could have thought of alone at times. The perfect example of that is in my first novel for young adults, Summer Begins. Summer writes an editorial and gets herself and her teacher in trouble. I thought I knew what came next in the plot, but when I sat down the next day, the editor of the newspaper announced in my head, "We're going to stage a protest." "You're what?" I asked him, and listened even harder. "Our favorite teacher has been asked to resign," he told me. "And we're not going to take that lying down. We're going to disrupt the Christmas program." All I had to do was type his plans for the protest -- and rewrite the entire rest of my book!

MBVoelker: How can you write those awkward, inarticulate times when people hang around saying, "Um, well ..." "I dunno how to say this ..." "Er, you know ..." in a life-like way without wallowing around in a bunch of tedious grunting and shuffling?

Sandy: The "less is more" rule applies here as well. A bit of tedious grunting and shuffling goes a long way. And one "Um, well" says it all.

MBVoelker: Just a comment -- I have had a couple experiences when I was writing just to get to know my characters better without having them involved in their actual stories and what they started saying told me things that I didn't know I knew about them. It's a startling and fascinating experience.

Sandy: It's the best, isn't it! I love it when that happens!

Moderator: What do writers need to know about punctuating dialogue?

Sandy: In a word, everything! I taught myself without memorizing any rules on the subject because I'm not great at memorizing and then applying rules at the right time. So what I did was keep a couple of dialogue-laden novels handy. I'd look up a line of dialogue similar in structure to the one I was trying to write and check on the punctuation -- until I finally figured it all out for myself.

Moderator: Is natural sounding dialogue the same thing as natural speech?

Sandy: Um...well...wha...wait a ... oh...the cat...hang on...what was I saying? No, it's not like natural speech. It's distilled speech, speech bent on telling a story as efficiently as possible.

Moderator: If your dialogue sounds wooden, even if it's grammatically correct, what can you do about it?

Sandy: Read it out loud, for one thing. Think about your character saying it, and about the context in which it's being said, then experiment with several different ways of saying the same thing. "You dirty rat!" No, that's too Jimmy Cagney. "You scumbag!" No, a ten year old girl wouldn't say that. "You silly twit!" That doesn't sound like my character either. "Weirdo!" Oh, that's her. Yup, now I've got it

SaraJ: I have noticed whether I have a male or a female protagonist, they end up sounding the same. How do I get around that?

Sandy: We don't talk all that differently, Sara. So, again, I'd look harder at what's being said and why, and I'd think about that particular character, not whether it's a male or a female.

Moderator: Our characters need to have distinct voices, so distinct that in some cases we shouldn't even need the tag lines to identify them. HOW can you make the voices distinct?

Sandy: Once you really know your character well, you know that there are things he or she would say and things he or she would not say. Again, this all has to be taken in context. Some characters will get sassy with an adult, and others will just not do it. So it's not so much a matter of fancy stylistic differences, tics, repetitions, and all that, although some of those things will come into play. It's more a matter of content and context: What does this character want and need to say at this moment in this story?

MBVoelker: How far can you reasonably go in using clipped speech to cut length in a short story? Is it OK to have one character talk that way? Two?

Sandy: Oooh, that's a tough one, MB. You can do some of that to cut the length in a story, sure, but it's awfully important to be true to the character, so I'd be more likely to try cutting the narration unless I was absolutely comfortable that my characters really did sound right speaking in a clipped manner.

BigSkyBoy: Please explain what is meant by "clipped" speech.

Sandy: Nothing special. Don't know, don't care. Stuff like that.

JAMES55CLINTON: What are tics?

Sandy: Oddities of expression, such as beginning every sentence with "Well" or that habit some people have of ending every sentence as if it were a question?

Moderator: Is it okay to use current slang in dialogue?

Sandy: That depends, I'd say, on what kind of publication you're writing for. If you can be absolutely sure that what you're writing is going to be published while that slang is still current, say in a teen magazine, where you know the editors will see about changing it if it's out of fashion. Then a certain amount of that will work. But in general it can take a couple months short of forever between the time a story or book gets accepted and the time it gets published -- and the slang is not current any more!

SaraJ: Where can you find slang that was current in the past, like in the 50's or 60's, so your "historical" characters sound right?

Sandy: I'd look in magazines of that time, and movies, but I'd also be careful about using too much historical slang as well. It falls so oddly on the modern ear that you run the danger of the reader not being able to identify with your historical character. You want the flavor, but not the full dose.

Moderator: For YA how can you convey the "four letter word" effect without actually using cursing? How can you be realistic without being offensive?

Sandy: You just have to figure that if you're going to use four letter words, you're going to lose sales to schools and libraries. Period. No two ways about it. I recommend reading books by Richard Peck, who just won the Newbery Award, something he's deserved for a long time. He made up his mind from the beginning that he wanted his books to reach young readers, so he just wasn't going to use four-letter words at all. He knows they know, and they know he knows they know, but his characters and stories are so compelling and so important and so real on so many other levels, that nobody misses the four-letter words. Librarians and teachers can recommend his books without hesitation, even when they're on very difficult topics.

red2: When putting a character's thoughts in italics, is it necessary to tag with 'he thought'?

Sandy: If you've made a convention of long passages of thought in italics so the reader is confident that everything in italics is a thought and nothing else, you probably don't need the tag line at all.

MBVoelker: What about one-sided phone conversations that your viewpoint character overhears? How can you handle that without confusing everyone? Unless your main character is supposed to be confused.

Sandy: It would seem to me that there'd be some physical context here that would help your reader understand what's going on. You'd need to set the stage, so that your character can be seen sitting at an outdoor cafe, perhaps, overhearing a neighbor shouting to someone over a cell phone. And I'd want to see that neighbor as well. So you'd have opportunities to put in some physical action now and then, which would help the reader see and hear what was going on and why.

BigSkyBoy: People talk extra loud at cell phones I've noticed -- I wish we had cell phone booths or designated areas. It might be fun to use them in dialogue.

Sandy: What I've decided is that people have always been rude. Cell phones have just given them a more apparent way to be that way!

SaraJ: For dialogue can you overlook some of the "rules of punctuation" and have characters use run-on sentences or one long sentence connected with a bunch of "ands" etc.?

Sandy: The trick, Sara, is to make sure the reader understands that the character is running on and that it's not you, the writer! So you can use ellipses... and dashes -- and so forth to keep that stream of dialogue going, and of course people don't always speak grammatically. But be sure the mistakes made in the dialogue are not repeated unwittingly in the narration!

Moderator: Are there any good books we could study on writing dialogue?

Sandy: Just about any book on writing for young people will have something to say about writing dialogue. Certainly books on play-writing will deal with it. But dialogue is something we all use every day, so observing and practicing are what's needed more than rules, in my opinion.

Moderator: Sandy, we're out of time. Thank you so much for coming tonight and sharing your expertise on writing dialogue with us. It's such a critical skill for writing believable fiction, and I know this has been a real help to our group.

Sandy: Thank you for inviting me, Kristi. And thank you all for your great questions!

Moderator: Be sure to come back in two weeks on June 7 when Elaine Marie Alphin, recent winner of the 2001 YA Edgar Award for COUNTERFEIT SON, will be here to talk about "Writing on Controversial Subjects." (Incidentally, Elaine is a former ICL writing student of Sandy Asher's!) COUNTERFEIT SON was a very difficult subject to write about, and Elaine met with resistance and criticism before, during and after publication. She's especially pleased with this prestigious award because now more teens will read the book. Elaine says teachers are even organizing groups of other teachers to read the book because they feel it brings out so poignantly the signs that adults who work with kids ought to be looking for. Two more of Elaine's "controversial" books are scheduled for publication: SIMON SAYS in 2002 and PICTURE PERFECT in 2003! Come back in two weeks for what promises to be a fascinating interview. Until then, get to work on your dialogue! Good night, everyone!

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