A reader's emotions can be sparked with few words. That's the power of dialogue.

A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets.

Readers, transformed by film and TV, are used to seeing stories. The reading experience . . . is increasingly visual.

Most of the time, tough, combative, adversarial dialogue is much more exciting than physical action.

A writer writes what other people only think.

In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories

To create tension, dialogue needs to be stretched out. That is, characters should not be immediately responsive.