Friday Chatter: Negative Space
Everything Is True
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One of the things I liked about “The Language Birds Speak,” in this week’s Short Story Smorgasbord, is the way it wrote Gracie’s dialogue. It wasn’t just abbreviated, but abbreviated in a way that conveyed Gracie’s hesitancy, the things she was more and less sure about, the circumstances that made her more and less confident. I’ve always been fascinated by the literary exercise of taking a character with limited verbal communication and seeing how much it’s possible to get across with the amount of words they can say. Do you have any favorite works that do this well?
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