People Are Talking: Learning to Leverage Dialogue for the Reveal

Good dialogue is the stealth engine of propulsive stories. Explication and summary have nothing on dialogue in terms of the wondrous and incisive ways it can build tension. This cross-genre workshop will explore how to rid your dialogue of artifice and infodumps and tropes. To write surprising, dynamic dialogue is to know your characters cold and what it is they most want. Only then can we unpack their Inner Stories and land on surprise. Together in this workshop we will experiment with new dialogue that allows your scenes to come fully alive and raises the roof and all the emotional stakes.

Susan Conely is the award-winning author of five critically-acclaimed books, including her newest, best-selling novel Landslide which was named a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” a TODAY Show “Best Summer Read,” a Vanity Fair “Book We Can’t Stop Thinking About,” and a New York Times "Paperback Row” Best Paperback Pick. It was also named a “Best Book” by Good Morning America, The New York Post, Medium, Bustle, Biblio Lifestyle and others, and it was chosen as Maine NPR's "All Books Considered" Bookclub Pick.

Her writing has appeared in places like The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Lithub, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Harvard Review, Downeast Magazine, Maine Magazine, Wildsam and others. She’s been awarded multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Maine Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She's won the Maine Book Award and the Maine Award for Publishing Excellence and has been a featured Tedx Speaker, where her talk the "Power of Story," has been viewed widely. She’s taught at a host of colleges and art-residencies including Emerson College, Colby College, The University of Massachusetts, as the Jack Kerouac Visiting Fellow, The Haystack School, The Spannochia Foundation, La Napoule Foundation, The Beijing Hutong and the Maine Media Workshops. She’s on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program and is co-founder of the Telling Room, a creative writing lab for kids in Portland, Maine.