Sally Rooney doesn't publish writing-advice listicles or teach workshops. What she has done, across a decade of interviews, is explain specific choices in enough detail that they double as advice. Two of them hold up on their own.
Cut What You Can't Apply Consistently
In the first draft of Conversations with Friends, Rooney used em-dashes to set off dialogue. Partway through revising, she noticed how much dialogue was sitting flush against the narration with no punctuation marking it as speech at all. She searched the document for every em-dash and deleted each one, letting the dialogue sit inside the prose the same way the rest of the book did.
I can't remember ever really using quotation marks. I don't see any need for them, and I don't understand the function they perform in a novel, marking off some particular pieces of the text as quotations. I mean, it's a novel written in the first person, isn't it all a quotation?
Sally Rooney, Stet magazine, 2018
The advice buried in that story isn't really about punctuation. Rooney treated a stylistic choice as a rule to apply everywhere or drop entirely, instead of a flourish to use whenever it felt right. If a technique doesn't survive being applied across an entire manuscript, it probably isn't earning its place in it.
She's talked about the pared-back instinct behind that decision too. Rooney has pointed to Hemingway's spare, mid-century American prose as one influence on her own sentences, a style built more on cutting than on adding.
Your Ordinary Writing Is Training Your Style
Rooney has pointed to an unglamorous source for her prose. In a 2018 interview with the Irish Times, she said a large part of her style developed through the emails she wrote, the everyday habit of building sentences for a reader with no literary stakes attached.
That's a useful reframe for anyone waiting until they feel like a real writer before taking their sentences seriously. The plain, functional writing most people already do is shaping their instincts whether they notice it or not. Rooney's dialogue reads like real conversation partly because her ear was trained on actual written exchanges, for years, before a novel was ever involved.
Read more about her process in the full Sally Rooney writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Pick a stylistic choice and apply it everywhere, or don't use it at all. Half-committing to a device draws more attention than skipping it entirely would.
- Take your everyday writing seriously. Emails and other low-stakes writing are still reps for your ear, whether you're thinking about craft or not.
- Trust the reader more than feels comfortable. Rooney's dialogue works without quotation marks because she assumes readers can follow who's speaking.
- Revise by searching, not just rereading. A pass that hunts for one specific inconsistency, like Rooney's em-dash search, catches things a normal read-through misses.