Thirty years before, in his revision notes for his first novel, Yates pondered what he viewed as the single biggest flaw in his work—sentimentality, … - Richard Yates
" "Thirty years before, in his revision notes for his first novel, Yates pondered what he viewed as the single biggest flaw in his work—sentimentality, the fact that his protagonists Frank and April were "too nice": "See and show both of these people from the outside, in the round, and from the inside too. Be 'simultaneously enchanted and repelled by their inexhaustible variety.' Think about them, and the hell with the reader's sympathies. Make them love and hate each other the way real people do." Yates seized on this approach—showing his characters from the outside and in—as the key to making otherwise unexceptional people interesting
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About Richard Yates
Richard Yates (February 3, 1926 – November 7, 1992) was an American fiction writer. His first novel, "Revolutionary Road" (1961), was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award and is listed in Time Magazine's 100 Best Novels.
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"It took me a long time to figure out... that the best way to handle [the couple's dialogue] was to have them nearly always miss each other's points, to have them talk around and through and at each other. There's a great deal of dialogue between them in the finished book... but there's almost no communication." In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald—namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one's characters "in the very act of giving themselves away".
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I don't get it, Laura said. How come boys can do whatever they feel like and girls can't? Because they're boys, Lucy cried. Boys have done whatever they've felt like since the beginning of time, don't you even know that? Haven't you ever learned that yet, you poor, ignorant little - how smart do you have to be to know a thing like that? They're irresponsible and self-indulgent and careless and cruel, and they get away with it all their lives because they're boys.
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