Christine Sneed - Interview #357 (7/20/15)

Award-winning author Christine Sneed, whose novel Paris, He Said, came out this spring from Bloomsbury USA.

Christine Sneed generously offered two Write the Book Prompts when I spoke to her. Gary Miller read one of them on the show last week. You can find it here. The second is a dialogue-writing exercise that Christine uses to encourage her undergrads to write with restraint. Write a short scene that happens almost entirely in dialogue.  Keep it to 2 or 3 characters.  In the scene, one of the characters should reveal a secret or some fact that worries or upsets the other person(s) in the scene.  Don’t overdo the reaction. Think about gestures the characters might also make or the physical/sensory details that would enable your readers to see the scene even more vividly.

Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another.

Music credits: 1) “Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) “Filter” - Dorset Greens (a Vermont band featuring several former South Burlington High School students).