It’s probably the reader’s favorite part of your book: her eyes will slide right past that big, carefully-crafted chunk of text, looking for some quotation marks. Dialogue is where you define and distinguish character, where you speed up the rhythm of your story, where you lighten or darken the mood. But it’s more than that: often the most crucial action of a book takes place in dialogue as well. So you want to be sure to get it right, and this workshop can help.

We’ll talk about different kinds of dialogue, list a few traps to avoid, and look at some examples of great and not-so-great dialogue. We’ll also do hands-on exercises, so bring paper and pen or laptop. You should emerge more confident in writing dialogue, able to spot weaknesses in your own dialogue passages and use the tools you learn in this workshop to bring them back to life.

Katherine Catmull is the author of Summer and Bird (Dutton Young Readers/Penguin), one of Booklist’s 2012 Top Ten First Novels for Youth and a TLA Spirit of Texas Reading pick for 2014-2015. Her YA fantasy The Radiant Road comes out from Dutton in January. She is one of four co-authors of The Cabinet of Curiosities (Greenwillow/HarperCollins, 2014), a collection of scary short stories. Catmull is also an actor, freelance arts writer, and a produced and published playwright.