Dialogue That Works: A First-Time Novelist's Guide to Writing Conversations That Feel Real

Janice White has spent the past fifteen years working with writers at every stage of their journey. As a developmental editor, she has helped more than forty debut novelists bring their manuscripts to publication with major and independent presses. Her editorial approach centers on the belief that craft can be taught, not just caught—and that dialogue, in particular, responds remarkably well to systematic practice.

Before becoming a full-time editor, Janice taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she developed a popular undergraduate course on narrative voice and dialogue. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has published short fiction in *The Southern Review*, *Kenyon Review*, and *Tin House*. Her own debut novel, *What Falls Away*, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Janice lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her partner and two remarkably talkative cats. She is a regular presenter at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference and leads weekend dialogue workshops at the North Carolina Writers' Network. When she isn't editing or teaching, she can be found reading middle-grade fiction (for research, she insists), cooking her way through Yotam Ottolenghi's cookbooks, or transcribing the conversations of strangers in coffee shops—all in the name of craft.

*Dialogue That Works* is her first book on the craft of writing. She is currently at work on a second craft book, tentatively titled *The Reluctant Narrator*, about building trust between unreliable narrators and their readers.