In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 270.
In my second semester of graduate school, I stopped setting my dialogue in quotation marks. At the time, I was working on a historical novel, set in Vietnam, and I was struggling with the voices of my characters—they felt too stagey, too dramatized. I suspected it was something about the quotation marks—the way they drew the eye immediately, throwing the dialogue up onto a slightly different plane from the rest of the text. It read like lines, not speech.
At the time, I was also reading the collected stories of Grace Paley, on a recommendation from my advisor, Alice Mattison. Paley’s later stories don’t use quotation marks; dialogue is set on its own line, or else with commas. This stylistic choice forces the reader to read a little more closely, a little more carefully, and it’s especially suited to fiction that has an interior, psychological aspect, because dialogue becomes reported speech. Once I started paying attention to quotation marks, I started noticing where they weren’t: not in the books of Sally Rooney, nor Katie Kitamura’s recent novels, nor those of Sigrid Nunez. These novelists, whom I admired, were writing books that asked the reader to take a closer look—and to trust, or not trust, in a narrator’s reportage and memories.
Kitamura, when asked by interviewer Darley Stewart about of her treatment of dialogue in Intimacies (Riverhead Books, 2021), said: “Everything is through the perspective of the narrator, everything passes through the filter of her consciousness, including dialogue, much of which is reported. That introduces a level of unreliability, and that ambiguity that you mention.” I was excited by this formal choice—that even dialogue could pass through the perspective of a narrator, that we could become totally immersed within a character’s consciousness. I tried it with my historical novel, and what felt stagey and unconvincing immediately returned to ordinary human speech.
While writing my novel, Discipline (Random House, 2026), I knew I’d maintain my fiction’s lack of quotation marks. I enjoy that it forces me to be more precise in my writing—to make it clear when a character is speaking, as opposed to acting—but I also enjoy the blurriness that can emerge. While in grad school, I also read Ghost Wall (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) by Sarah Moss, which utilizes that ambiguity brilliantly. The novella’s narrator, a young woman with an abusive father, is used to keeping shy and quiet. In lines that begin as speech and end as thought, Moss allows her narrator to express herself, while preserving the safety of her rebellious impulses. It’s a deceptively simple formal choice that allows the reader into the narrator’s emotions, while seeing just how much she holds back.
Though I don’t replicate Moss’s technical trick in Discipline, I was interested in a narrator who filters experience for the reader, and who also withholds information—and even emotion—from other characters, as well as herself. Christine, the narrator of Discipline, is a writer, one who has turned a real-life relationship into a sensationalized novel. She’s an unreliable narrator precisely because she is a writer—she knows the power storytelling holds—and it was a pleasure to push that part of her character, applying pressure on what not only Christine but also the reader takes to be the truth. When we see quotation marks on a page, we assume what they contain is, in some way, true. We believe someone said that, for dialogue is faithful. In removing quotation marks, we ask the reader to read carefully, thoughtfully, and to trust our narrator to take them somewhere else, somewhere new.
Larissa Pham is the author of the novel Discipline (Random House, 2026); the essay collection Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy (Catapult, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard prize; and the novella Fantasian (Badlands Unlimited, 2016). She teaches creative writing at the New School in New York.
image credit: Volodymyr Hryshchenk