Reviews of favorite books

Writing Craft: Dialogue by Robert McKee

6/16/2025

Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen is a comprehensive survey of dialogue techniques with many examples drawn from plays, movies, and literature.
The author defines dialogue as “an outward execution of an inner action. All talk responds to a need, engages a purpose, and performs an action.”
He provides a detailed deconstruction of dialogue elements such as sentence structure, deliberate pauses, the use and misuse of figurative language, how to avoid melodrama, and more.
The author also relates dialogue to other story components such as plot, pacing, and characterization.

To express a character through “verbal action,” the author suggests answering three questions:

What does my character want out of this situation [scene]?
At this precise moment, what action would [s]he take to reach that desire?
What exact words would [s]he use to carry out that action?

The author also explores subtext throughout the book.
“The text of a character’s spoken words conceals her inner life from other characters while at the same time allowing the reader/audience to see through the surface of her behavior."
"… readers and audiences instinctively look past the words to intuit the unsaid, to glimpse what the character actually thinks and feels (subtext) but chooses not to put into words. The writer, therefore, must hone dialogue so that this is possible, so that the unsaid can be sensed by implication.”
"Dialogue should imply, not explain, its subtext."

The author explores several types of dialogue in-depth, analyzing popular media beat by beat to illustrate how the writer constructed their dialogue and the effects they achieved: dramatic conflict (The Sopranos); comic conflict (Frazier); asymmetric conflict (A Raisin in the Sun); indirect conflict (The Great Gatsby); reflexive (inner) conflict (The Museum of Innocence); and minimal Conflict (Lost in Translation).

Some favorite quotes:

Dialogue problems are story problems.
Creativity is choice-making.
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences…
Be judicious in the placement of pauses. Shape the rhythm of scenes without undue hesitation, so that when you put on the brakes, the standstill moment grips attention.
Silence is the ultimate economy of language.
Each verbal expression takes an inner action.
A unique verbal style characterizes each role.
Create honest motivation for behavior.
The problem of melodrama is not over-expression but under-motivation.
To create fresh, original dialogue, set high standards and never settle for the obvious choice.
The more emotional people become, the shorter the words and sentences they use; the more rational people become, the longer the words and sentences they use.
Clarity above all.
Repetition trivializes meaning.
Voice is not a choice, it’s a result [of character].
The stronger the inner scene, the more powerful the dialogue.

The final chapter provides a detailed list of forty-four questions covering topics like scene intention, motivation, subtext, beat progression, tactics, turning points, and characterization. The author suggests writers “Ask and answer these questions on every beat [of your story]. When in the middle of writing the scene’s dialogue, ask and answer these questions again. After you’ve written the scene, ask and answer these questions a third time. The best questions create the best answers.”
Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen provides extensive tools any writer can incorporate to elevate and focus character dialogue.

Other books by Robert McKee: Story, and Character.
For more dialogue tips, read Subtext.

Short Stories: The Way of the Wizard ed. John Joseph Adams

6/14/2025

The Way of the Wizard is a collection of stories featuring sorcery in various forms. The anthology opens with George R.R. Martin’s “In the Lost Lands,” a haunting tale recently made into a movie by the same title. The story originally appeared in the excellent anthology Amazons II.
The opening lines: “You can buy anything you might desire from Gray Alys. But it is better not to.”
A beautiful queen pays Gray Alys to get a werewolf pelt for her—and the queen’s lover pays Alys to fail. The witch agrees to both bargains. I’ll confess I had to Google an explanation of the ending as I’m not great at deciphering subtlety, but the explanation made the story even more satisfying.

“The Magician, the Maid, and Other Stories” by Christie Yant blends the power of fairy tales with romance. A woman stalks the sorcerer who stole her beloved, an aspiring wizard who disappeared when attempting a powerful spell to earn his place as the King’s Magician. The woman is determined to bring her sweetheart home, whatever the cost.
The romance unravels slowly and the ending is completely satisfying~

Krista Hoeppner Leahy pens a tale about one of the men with Odysseus (from the Greek tale The Odyssey), changed into a pig by the sorceress Circe in “Too Fatal a Poison.” The opening line: “Being a pig changed me.”
Throughout the story, the narrator struggles with the simplicity and immediacy of his life as a pig versus his human grief for a deceased friend. The pig-centric passages are immersive: “The smells like fists punching my snout, the pent-up power in my haunches, the ground right there, inches from my chin, begging me to plow it with my snout.”
“Too Fatal a Poison” is a powerful exploration of our animal nature and the pain of mourning.

“Winter Solstice” by Mike Resnik is an interesting take on the Merlin myth. Merlin lives backwards in time, and as he grows younger, his memories of the future fade. The author notes the story was his exploration of Alzheimer's Disease. The closing lines:
“Everything is slipping away, drifting on the wind.
Please, somebody help me.
I’m frightened.”

Kelly Link’s “The Wizards of Perfil” is a great take on sibling rivalry, the devastation of war, and the resiliency of love. A family fleeing ahead of an advancing army is given the opportunity to “sell” one child to the famed Wizards of Perfil. Instead of the obvious choice, the day-dreaming cousin, the nasty older sister is chosen.
She resents every moment of backbreaking chores she performs in the wizard’s service, and worse, begins to have premonitions of impending doom for her family, who are on a train headed west. She’s able to get a message to her dreamy cousin, but he isn’t sure how to get the adults to listen.
During the course of the story, the older sister grows in compassion and comes to embrace her ability to help change the course of the world. The actual identity of the wizards is another memorable element of the story.

Cinda Williams Chima offers a compelling story of an enslaved enchantress working for a trader in magical artifacts in “The Trader and the Slave.” When a wizard arrives looking to barter a powerful artifact, the trader orders the enchantress to seduce and poison him—but the wizard sees through the scheme.
The enchantress’s emotional journey through resentment, fear, revulsion, and hope is the most powerful element of the story.

Vylar Kaftan’s “The Orange-Tree Sacrifice” is an intense exploration of spiritual sacrifice with echoes of Indigenous North American Sun Dance ceremonies.
A peasant girl hangs suspended and dying, surrounded by eleven wizard lords waiting eagerly to use her death to fuel their magic. The men, bored and complaining of sore backs from sitting so long, try to hurry the process by torturing her, but the girl has made a vow of service to her goddess—who has her own plans. The brutal yet transformative story is only two pages long, but resonated long after I finished reading it.

“One-Click Banishment” by Jeremiah Tolbert equates computer code with magic. The story is told through online posts by a character who uses sprogs (spells + programs) to work his magic. Things go awry when the cyber-security authorities arrest him then draft him to fight a demon who is stealing souls through an online user agreement clause. It’s delightfully clever and the ending is a hoot.

There are thirty-two stories total in The Way of the Wizard. I enjoyed the anthology as a whole, but few of the stories were as impactful as those I highlighted in this review. Still worth the read and grateful my library had the book to lend.

Other worthy short story anthologies:
The Best of World SF, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, Best New Romantic Fantasy

Fiction: Someone You Can Build a Next In by John Wisell

6/6/2025

A delightful fantasy-horror, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, follows the misadventures of Shesheshen, an earnest shape-shifting monster who falls in love with a human woman.
In Shesheshen’s world, love means planting your eggs within your beloved so your young can devour the carcass from the inside out. But Shesheshan quickly realizes humans have very different ideas about love—and eating her new girlfriend Homily isn’t an option, no matter how delicious she smells.
Shesheshen decides to confess her true nature to Homily, but before she can, Homily reveals she’s part of a family bound to hunt and destroy Shesheshen to end their family curse.

Monster hunters routinely track and try to kill Shesheshen, which she finds rude and irritating. A pair of monster-killers come to her lair in the book’s opening, awakening her early from her annual hibernation, and the stakes rise from there.
Shesheshen’s shapeshifting is the most unusual aspect of the novel; she can incorporate anything she consumes into her body: chain, metal rods, bone, flesh, organs.

Here she is awakening from hibernation: “Along the floor of the bathing room lay iron rods and dense stones, which she’d left out last season. She rolled across them, letting them cut through external layers of her flesh with a sting that felt like waking up. Her innards squeezed these rod and stones, aligning them into a loose skeletal structure. A steel chain once used to bind her now made an excellent spinal column, flexible without breaking when catapults lobbed debris at her.”
Her consumption of the hunters who accost her is visceral without being gory: “He had the chest of a man who exercises for sport, which made for pleasant chewing. His marrow was unusually sweet, and his bones hard against her orifices. Sturdy bones scratched pleasantly against her insides, and she squeezed them into alignment so she could hold new shapes.”

Throughout the story, Shesheshan’s unique voice and perspective on the world provides much of the zany comedy:

“For some reason, clutching at clothing was a classic human sign of being pathetic.”
“I was going badly enough. It might as well go badly on horseback.”
“People like that had the most delicious-tasting heads.”
“Homily’s [bed]room was everything Shesheshen didn’t like about people. A bed larger than any human’s surface area, and the sheets were so tight across it that you would have to wrestle to get under them. Mirrors hung on the walls, to trick you into thinking you were company. Dressers and bureaus to encourage people to change clothes more frequently than made sense. Bedrooms were made out of bad habits.”
“It was much nicer tonight than last night, and not just because Shesheshen wasn't dying of poison this time.”
“She was going to eat her mother-in-law for the common good.”
“From what she knew of civilization, all children were parasites. You were supposed to grow to like that about them.

While trying to pass as a human woman, Shesheshen falls in love with kind and caring Homily, then unhappily develops a strange organ in the center of her chest that aches whenever Homily is unhappy.
“Companionship. That was civilization's trap and snare. And Shesheshen had stepped right into it.”
Things get more complicated when she learns Homily is trying to kill the local “monster”. Then Shesheshen meets Homily’s dysfunctional family. It soon becomes apparent that Homily is abused emotionally and physically by her family, and has compensated by learning to be overly giving. Shesheshen tries to support Homily without rescuing her, and at the same time avoid being discovered and slaughtered by her family.

The most audacious character is Homily’s mother, the Baroness. She has led many successful military campaigns and brags about slaughtering Shesheshen’s mother years ago. She rules her family with an iron will and is cruel and dismissive of Homily, while idolizing Homily’s siblings.
The Baroness’s backstory is revealed late in the novel: it wasn't a surprise to me, but it set off a madcap scramble to kill the “monster” creating a wild ride up until the thrilling conclusion.
Some readers have taken exception to Shesheshen’s therapy-like insights into Homily’s trauma and family drama, and there were times the author used the characters as advocates, but overall the insights into how people respond to and process trauma added to the complexity of the novel. The denouement was a sweet wrap-up providing a happy ending for our main characters.
Read Someone You Can Build a Nest In for a cozy horror-fantasy with a unique “monster” who proves to be very human. Nominated for the 2025 Nebula and Hugo awards.

Other books with brave characters overcoming traumatic situations:
Four Profound Weaves, Light from Uncommon Stars, Nettle & Bone,
A Taste of Gold and Iron, The Bruising of Qilwa, The Queens of Innis Lear,
A Closed and Common Orbit, Dead Country, A Sorceress Comes to Call

Nonfiction: Disfigured by Amanda Leduc

6/3/2025

Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space explores Western cultural messages about disability and otherness. The author was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and underwent several surgeries as a young child. She uses those experiences (and her continued awkward walking pattern) as a lens to explore how fairy tales affected her identity as a disabled person.
The author’s personal struggles with her disability are interwoven with insightful analysis of the cultural role of fairy tales and stories on our collective consciousness.
The book begins with an interesting exploration of the history of fairy tales themselves. The Grimm fairy tales, for example, celebrated a nostalgic “bygone paradise of rural German life.”

The author also gives the historic background of the Disney studios and the “Disneyfication” of popular fairy tales. Disney created “a line of princesses who are at once all different and yet entirely the same—all young, all beautiful.”

The author gives an especially scathing critique of Rapunzel:
“In the seventh edition of the tale [from the Brothers Grimm] . . . Rapunzel tells the prince to come back each time with a skein of silk, which she will weave into a ladder. It is endlessly interesting to me that the prince doesn't come back with his own rope, ready to rescue the maiden—nor does he alert his kingdom to her captivity and come charging to the tower army in hand. She is better in the tower—contained, special. As long as she’s in the tower, she exists just for him.”

Some of the other stories explored in the book:

“Hans My Hedgehog,” about an adventurous half-hedgehog boy who sheds his otherness and transforms into a handsome man once he marries a princess.
In “The Maiden without Hands” a miller makes a bargain with the Devil and barters away his daughter. Rather than go with the Devil, the maiden chops off her own hands. After some misadventures, a king falls in love with her and makes her silver hands. Then the Devil interferes and she is cast out while the king is away at war. The king eventually finds her again. “The queen’s hands have grown back in the interim, as hands in fairy tales are wont to do if you pray hard enough.”
“The Little Mermaid” makes a bad bargain because of her desperate desire to transform herself for love, and gives up her voice to get legs. Says the author: “Ariel gained her legs by magic. I gained my legs by the less romantic practicalities of orthopedic surgery.”
Regarding “Beauty and the Beast,” the author asks if the Beast “isn’t made precisely as terrible as he is as a result of the world’s reaction to his disfigurement?”

The author explains how many of these fairy tales are based on ableism: “a system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, and excellence.”

In all of these stories transformation happens to the protagonist, not society. In fairy tales, “we support and perpetuate a culture where the emphasis is on the cure rather than societal change—where the aim of the narrative is to eradicate the disabled life rather than change the world so that the disabled life can thrive.”
The author delves into her personal history with disability relative to these pervasive stories:
“When you are taught from the time you are a young child that the disabled body is weak and other, set apart, you partake in a world that seeks to entrench this otherness through systemic and cultural barriers. You participate in a culture, even unknowingly, that furthers disabled exclusion.”

The author explores several models of disability:

The social model says disability is “maintained by systemic barriers, exclusion, and negative attitude toward these disabilities more than the physical limitations or conditions themselves.” Buildings with ramps and elevators don’t create the same barriers as those with steep stairs.
The medical model sees disability as an individual defect that “must be cured or eliminated if the person is to achieve full capacity as a human being.” This is based on the belief that there is only one “right” way to move or be in the world.
The charity model “depicts disabled people as victims of circumstance who are deserving of pity” and “as long as individual charities and charitable actions exist to make gestures toward those who are less fortunate, there is less need for . . . sweeping societal change.”

The book closes with a manifesto asking for new fairy tales, such as the “queen in a wheelchair marries no one because she doesn’t need to marry to show that her life brims with joy.”
She goes on: “Give me stories where disability is synonymous with a different way of seeing the world and a recognition that the world can itself grow as a result of this viewpoint.”
The author invites the world to “start telling different stories about a body that might just look like mine, and reshaping the world to fit them. I am already enough. There is no need to be more.”

Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space provides a comprehensive overview of Western fairy tales and the messages they convey about disability, personal transformation, and cultural norms. Thank you to my local library for this fabulous read!

For more insights on ableism and disability, read Disability Visibility,
Disability Intimacy, and Being Seen

Writing Craft: Dialogue by Robert McKee

Short Stories: The Way of the Wizard ed. John Joseph Adams

Fiction: Someone You Can Build a Next In by John Wisell

Nonfiction: Disfigured by Amanda Leduc

What I'm reading

Archives