Annotated and grouped by what each source is good for. Starred items are the recommended first three.
15.1 On how talk actually works
- ★ Grice, H. P. “Logic and Conversation” (1975). Twenty pages, and the most useful thing a novelist can read about dialogue, because it explains subtext. The account of implicature is the theory of subtext, stated with a precision the craft literature has never achieved. Read it in Studies in the Way of Words if the anthology is unavailable.
- Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, “A Simplest Systematics” (1974). Technical and worth the effort. The findings on turn-taking and, in the wider literature, on preference organisation, describe the structures readers have internalised and against which a novelist’s stylisations are read.
- Goffman, Erving. Forms of Talk (1981). “Footing” is the essay to read first. The decomposition of the speaker role into animator, author and principal is immediately usable in revision.
- Brown and Levinson, Politeness (1987). For the systematic account of why people are indirect when they have nothing to hide — the necessary corrective to reading all indirection as concealment.
- Tannen, Deborah. Talking Voices (1989). Accessible and pleasurable. The finding that ordinary speakers construct rather than report dialogue is the best available defence of novelistic licence.
15.2 On dialogue in the novel specifically
- ★ Page, Norman. Speech in the English Novel (1973). Still the standard study, and still without a rival. Historically grounded, technically precise on the report/quotation boundary, and full of examples. The one book on this chapter’s subject a student should own.
- Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination (1981) and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984). Heteroglossia and polyphony. Difficult, repetitive, and the source of every serious argument about why characters must sound different. The Dostoevsky book is the more approachable.
- Leech and Short, Style in Fiction (1981). The clearest available taxonomy of speech and thought presentation — direct, indirect, free indirect, narrative report of a speech act — and the vocabulary this chapter’s §3.5 depends on.
- Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds (1978). For the boundary between speech and thought, and for what happens to dialogue when a novel goes inside a head.
15.3 On subtext and the craft of the exchange
- ★ McKee, Robert. Dialogue (2016). A craft manual, to be read critically as a document of a practice rather than as theory, but the most sustained treatment of subtext available at book length and useful because its assumptions are so clearly those of the tradition §16 questions.
- Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction. The standard university textbook; its dialogue chapter is sound and its examples are well chosen.
- Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft. Short, exacting, and the best available exercises on sentence rhythm — which is the substrate of voice differentiation.
15.4 On dialect, register and representation
- Wright, Richard. “Between Laughter and Tears” (1937). The contemporary attack on Their Eyes Were Watching God, worth reading in full alongside the novel. The reversal of critical judgement since is one of the most instructive episodes in twentieth-century American criticism.
- Parkes, M. B. Pause and Effect (1993). For the history of the marks themselves, and the demonstration that quotation convention is roughly two centuries old.
15.5 Within this textbook
- Chapter 1 (The Purposes of a Scene) — the underlying unit; the value-shift test and the domains of purpose, including the relational domain proposed there, which this chapter inherits.
- Chapter 2 (Scene and Sequel) — where the Decision beat lands, and why it usually lands in speech.
- Chapter 4 (The Descriptive Detail) — denotation and connotation, the descriptive analogue of text and subtext.
- Chapter 6 (The Chapter Break) — the break placed inside an exchange.
- Chapter 13 (The Viewpoint Shift) — who reports the speech, and what the reader is permitted to know about the gap between channels.
- Chapter 7 (Backstory and Flashback) — nested retrospection, and dialogue reported at two removes.
- Chapter 9 (The Opening Pages) — the unanchored opening, the withholding tease, and the rules of notice this chapter relies on.
- Chapter 10 (The Prologue) — where the shop, the pen and the register drawer are planted.