Susan Juby talks dialogue

A 2008 book I loved to death but didn't write about here (because I ended up writing about it elsewhere) was Getting the Girl: A Guide to Private Investigation, Surveillance, and Cookery by Susan Juby. In short, it's about a boy (a nice boy! score one for more nice guys in YA literature!) named Sherman. Sherman is kind of a geek, but he's a good-hearted geek, and he's got a crush on a girl named Dina. He's worried that Dina is about to become a victim of D-listing, in which a girl's picture appears on the guy's bathroom wall with a letter "D" inscribed in the corner. Girls who are D-listed drop into nonexistence almost instantly. Not wanting this to happen, Sherman takes it upon himself to investigate who's behind the D-listings, an act that wins him both respect and hatred.

In her MySpace blog today, Susan Juby (who is made of awesome, btw) talks about the challenges and realities of writing good dialogue. Since the quality of dialogue is always a huge factor in whether or not I think a book is any good, I read what she had to say with interest. See her entry here: What's that you said?