Word: preceptions
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...novels or so, and reviewers have continued to praise him, especially for his dialogue -- though with diminishing patience, as if having an uncanny ear and using it were a bit too easy. This drives the author a little crazy when he thinks about it, and he thumps down a precept that could be carved in stone: "Dialogue is character is plot." In a shrewd book published last June, On Writing, he approvingly notes that John O'Hara, a novelist he admires above almost all others, would tell a whole chapter with dialogue -- a husband and wife, for instance, punching with...