The spoken voice

Abstract

Conversation in a novel or short story resembles authentic conversation, but never copies it. You do not, for a start, reproduce typical non-fluency features, except for the occasional hesitation or incomplete sentence. And from the literary point of view, conversation in a novel has to do much more than sound like reallife talk. It advances the action and adds to our knowledge about a character. Here are some examples. The first is from the American writer Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). Hemingway’s style created a fashion which was copied by many other writers. In structural terms it is paratactic, both its narrative and dialogue, consisting largely of simple sentences or short clauses linked by and or but.