>> Later on, when you do the exercise for this course,
you'll have an occasion to go hammer and tongs at your own work.
I will give you some detail about that later on.
In this module and
I think Sophie's list of words to excise might be of help to you.
Another thing I wanted to talk to you about,
Ron Charles in the Washington post wrote about your characters,
I moved through with a slowly accruing sense of awe as
these characters grew simultaneously more outrageous and more sympathetic.
Bravo or brava.
Well I think that's largely due to the excellent lines you give them to speak,
I mean, there's this book is so
full of dialogue that is just it just crackles on the page.
And, you know for all I know those characters you didn't write the dialogue
or maybe you feel as though the characters were speaking it to you.
People often feel as though, we know certain rules or
certain understandings of how I want my prose to be.
But in dialogue, all the rules are out the window.
Rules for example, like wanting to be concise.
What if I said What if I said, well but Sophie,
I'm sorry, if you've actually wrote down all of the words that people say in order.
There's a lot of ums and uhs.
There are a lot of so's and then's and so on.
What would you say to that person as a creator of expert dialog?
>> Well, dialog is very hard.
I think it's hard in part because it's where we, as the writer,
are lying the most, in a way, is that we're suggestion that this is most like
natural speech as we get in fiction but it's totally artificial,
and I think getting rid of all of those um's and
so's and is almost always right.
And it's almost always right because the reader fills those in,
in a way, in a very sort of quick and sub textual way.
I think there's no benefit to the meaning of the story at hand to
have those so's and those um's.
I think unlike life where we may be having a conversation that doesn't really
have a point, but its wonderful because we are enjoying each others company.
A conversation in a book has some point.
>> It takes a lot of work to get characters to sound as casually
malicious as your characters are sometimes.
And then how they're often casually very, very tender with each other but
it all happens in these very, very sharp moves on the page.
>> Yeah. Thank you.
>> Sophie McMannis, the author of The Unfortunates.
She was published in 2015 in the novel by for stess and truth.
Thanks for coming to Middletown and talking to us.
>> Thank you so much, Salvatore.