How we transform our memories and experiences into fiction beyond the injunction to ‘write what you know’. The imaginative process includes filling in the gaps of memory, embracing the freedom to invent, selecting a viewpoint and adding energy through dialogue. We need to consider not only which details and descriptions to include but which to omit: the balancing of information affects the meaning and impact of the story.

How we use dialogue to develop character and advance plot. Overcoming anxiety about dialogue; the dangers of avoiding dialogue. Reported speech lacks energy; dialogue enlivens a scene. Dialogue reveals character, indicates relationship and conveys information, but has to appear authentic. Strong dialogue combines multiple functions. Punctuating and attributing dialogue; adverbs qualifying tone.

How to interrogate and improve your writing. Correcting errors; removing redundant phrases; trimming or augmenting attribution in speech; integrating action and speech; checking dialogue for authenticity; monitoring sentence length; balancing the extent of detail and description; scrutinising the chronology of description; checking narrative viewpoint is secure.

Thomas Pott takes as a point of departure the gospel’s unmistakable call for the unity of the Body of Christ. This leads him to reflect on several issues over which there is division in the Church. However, none of these issues is capable of endangering the fact that the liturgy bears, manifests, and transmits ecclesial unity uniquely and fundamentally.

An introduction to the historical and philosophical context of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and an overview of some general questions to be investigated in the volume, particularly: the question of Cicero’s ‘Socratic method’, his use of dialogue, his claim to argue on both sides of a question, and the relationship between this and his Academic scepticism.

This chapter explores how the ancient literary and philosophical dialogue form maintained its relevance as a tool of cultural and religious identity formation and competition. It addresses the ongoing scholarly discussion regarding the scope for dialogue in the face of rising authoritarianism and dogmatism in late antiquity.

In this chapter, I argue that a comprehensive picture of Platonic autonomy must be balanced by attention to mutual interdependence and the ways that ideas arise through interpersonal dialogue. Philosophical ideas arise in a social context, and to this degree, even ideas that are now ‘my own’ have come to be mine in part through the reasoning of other persons. Moreover, as a result of human fallibility, even the fully developed Platonic philosopher still requires conversational partners to both learn and to test out ideas. Rather than overvaluing self-sufficiency, a philosophical life includes being open to challenges to one’s ideas, tolerating a state of not knowing fully, and learning that one needs others due to the limits of individual reasoners.

Keeping track of how appreciation and understanding of Tristan und Isolde has evolved, in live performance, recording and scholarly studies, is a formidable task. One path through the labyrinth is opened up by Wagner’s poetic text, in which the title characters express their disorientation, their alienation from communal norms. Stage directors and musicological commentators alike have found ways of dramatising the particular tensions between conformity and nonconformity that encapsulate the drama’s representations of love and death, in settings that balance magical interventions (the love potion) against the worldly intrusions of King Marke and his entourage. Surveying and critiquing accounts of the role that Tristan und Isolde has played at the heart of fundamental changes to musical form and style since the 1860s reinforces the value of arguing that the continued presence of modernist qualities in contemporary music – works by Schoenberg, Nono, Henze, Andriessen and Anderson are instanced - is a direct consequence of Wagner’s materials and methods, particularly in Tristan.

The journey of mediation as a non-authoritative process into the court system has come full circle with one utterly different model emerging in contemporary times. As mentioned in the previous chapters, mediation has inspired hybrid judicial roles and settlement promotion and introduced consent as the foundation for many hybrid legal processes. Yet this hybridization has worked both ways, affecting mediation as well. Authority-based mediation is emerging as an advanced judicial process that generates public norms. This new sophisticated model for dealing with polycentric legal problems while preserving soft qualities of the process and keeping a narrow focus on a legal outcome is, in fact, a novel form of private adjudication. We describe this emergent form of mediation and its theoretical underpinnings.

Chapter 4 explores conceptualizations and aspects of peacebuilding, reconciliation, and dialogue, and their connection to personal narratives of genocide and war. Our understanding of peacebuilding synthesizes concepts and ideologies offered by major scholars and activists in the world, such as Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Leo Tolstoy. Furthermore, it emphasizes ideological nonviolence, creativity, and the use of personal narratives and Buberian-based dialogue in peacebuilding and sustainability. This chapter adds the final “piece of the mosaic” of the academic framework for understanding the roles that personal narratives of massive social-political trauma can play in sustainable peacebuilding and reconciliation (or in peace obstruction processes), presented in the preceding chapters.

The novel of ideas was rejected by British-based modernist writers. In the international literary sphere there was less hostility to the fictional representation of philosophical, political and religious ideas, and there was also significant critical discussion of literature as a specific kind of speculative thinking. Outside Britain the representation of ideas and the formal experimentations of the modern novel were not seen as being in conflict with one another. Writers at the forefront of developments in the novel, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Rabindranath Tagore and Jean-Paul Sartre were both formally experimental and engaged with the novelistic implications of philosophical, religious or political thought. In this chapter I consider two kinds of modern novels of ideas, the ironic and the dialogistic. I focus on the writing of John Galsworthy in relation to Thomas Mann’s ironic Buddenbrooks and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory in relation to André Malraux’s dialogistic La Condition Humaine.

H. G. Wells did not openly identify his fiction as a contribution to the ‘novel of ideas’ until the publication of Babes in the Darkling Wood in 1940. And yet, he arguably did more than any other writer of his time to shape this tradition in Britain and to distinguish its trajectory and priorities from that of the dominant ‘modernist’ tradition. This chapter explores how Wells understood the difference between his own work and that of peers such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf the difference between the novel as a disseminator of social, political ideas and the novel as Art. It then investigates the significance of ‘dialogue’ and ‘exposition’ to Wells as a means of embedding these ideas in fiction, moving from Ann Veronica (1909) through lesser known works such as The Undying Fire: A Contemporary Novel (1919), to The Shape of Things to Come (1933).