I had lunch with a friend this afternoon, then afterward went to get my haircut. Since the salon is less than a block from the Green Hills Library, I decided to stop there and see what, if any, writing-craft books they had that might be helpful in preparing the Say What? series (since that seems to be the winner by a long shot!). They didn’t have anything solely on the subject of dialogue, but I couldn’t leave without picking up a few, so here’s what I picked up and a little tidbit from each:

Gotham Writers’ Workshop: WRITING FICTION The Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School

“In the beginning is an idea. Ideas are seeds from which the mimosa tree or watermelon, or delphinium of a story will arise. There are no rules about what constitutes a proper seed. It can be a character, a name, a situation, structure, overhead dialogue, a setting, a theme, even a vague feeling.”

The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates

“Write Your heart out. Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject. Your ‘forbidden’ passions are likely to be the fuel for your writing. . . . What advice can an older writer presume to offer a younger? Only what he or she might wish to have been told years ago. Don’t be discouraged! Don’t cast sidelong glances and compare yourself to others among your peers! (Writing is not a race. No one really ‘wins.’ The satisfaction is in the effort, and rarely in the consequent rewards, if there are any.) Again, write your heart out.“

Letters to a Fiction Writer ed. by Frederick Busch

“Probably you are a great or a good noticer. You may well be the one in your family who paid attention to your family members more than the others did. You sometimes knew what they would say before they actually said it. When they were out of the room, their voices sounded in your inner ear. Quite possibly, you were good at imitating all of them. You were the watcher. Sometimes, you felt like a spy: you were spying on the whole of life itself. This condition has its own kind of excitement and pathos, but it very clearly carries along with its discoveries a feeling of tension, and estrangement. Without quite knowing how, you fell just a bit outside the groups of which you were a member.” (Charles Baxter)

How to Grow a Novel: The Most Common Mistakes Writers Make and How to Overcome Them by Sol Stein

“A writer is someone who looks forward to the day’s work, even if it lasts only an hour or two before the writer has to dash to a job that supports him and his family until such happy time that the writing itself may be economically rewarding. On those days when external circumstances prevent his writing, a writer feels a hollowness, an absence, a longing. . . . True, some writers suffer while writing. I regret their pain, and am glad to report that as one masters the craft, the pain ebbs, and the pleasure of being able to control the result can bring the second-greatest pleasure of life, the creation of text that arouses the emotions of distant readers.”

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King

“A word of warning: because writing and editing are two different skills, they require two different mind-sets. Don’t try to do both at once. The time to edit is not when you’re writing your first draft. But once that first draft is finished, you can use the principles in this book to increase—dramatically—the effectiveness of the story you’ve told and the way you’ve told it. You can drop your amateurish look and give your writing a professional edge. In other words, you can edit yourself into print.”

And then I ordered this one from Amazon yesterday:
Writing Dialogue by Tom Chiarella

“The world is crowded with voices. While we can retreat to our silences from time to time, most of us are called on to speak and listen for the better part of every day. From the beginning of our lifes we listen, in preparation to speak. . . . So what’s hard about writing dialogue? It’s just speaking, right? Well, the truth is, writing dialogue is not all that hard.”