Eric Akoto

What’s more difficult than writing a good story? Writing good dialogue. Dialogue is an essential part of every writer’s arsenal. Get it right and it can do wonders for your novel or short story. Mess it up and it ends up a deadweight dragging the narrative down and taxing the reader’s patience. I have been agonizing over the quality of the dialogue in the novel I am working on right now. The first draft of my novel was generously peppered with dialogue.

Picture Credits: Ryan McGuire Agents and editors often say that they’re looking for a narrative with a compelling voice or a “voice driven narrative.” What does that mean? When agents talk about voice, they’re referring to the voice of a writer, an author’s voice. Voice is not just about style or a distinctive style, it is inseparable from the writing itself. Voice is a writer’s perspective of the world.

Future Archives AI / Authorship / Literary Culture Bookshops have always been engines of trust: places where judgement, taste and public attention meet. Photograph by Georg Eiermann / Unsplash. Essay After a season of AI allegations, prize anxiety and bookseller caution, a Future Archives essay on what still makes writing feel alive: trust, judgement, pressure and the human decisions left on the page. The literary question is not whether machines can produce sentences. They can.