Sally Rooney and Kishani Widyaratna: Normal People
London Review Bookshop Podcast
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Is There Speech Marks in Your Novel?
I dispensed with speech marks quite some time ago, so there's no speech marks in the novel either. I don't know that i've ever published fiction that did have them, though i definitely haven't. M, for me, speech marks just looked intrusive on the page, because they're so often, there'll be like, pages and pages of dialogue. In terms of why i wrote it all in present tense, that was because i was using a lot of flashbacks,. And it'so easier if you're putting the flashbacks in past tense, then you can put your main body of your narrative in present tense. And the flow between them is really easy.
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