The Art of Dialogue with Mary Anne Butler

Multi award-winning playwright Mary Anne Butler is known for her sharp writing, resonating characters and powerful, honest dialogue. Don’t miss this chance to learn from her in our 8-week online masterclass.

Dates: 6:00-8:00pm (AEST) Tuesdays, 16 June – 4 August 2026.
Delivery: Online
Fees: $1295 or $1200 for Varuna alumni
Who should apply: Emerging or established writers are welcome to apply
Applications close: 5pm AEST 13 May 2026
Places: 8 participants will be selected (small group)

The Art of Dialogue drills down into how to craft dialogue on the page, ensuring that each of your character’s voices is unique.

As a whole group, we’ll analyse examples of excellence and innovation in dialogue across a range of genres including fiction, non-fiction, memoir and stage plays, dissecting them for their mastery of rhythm, syntax, subtext, backstory, foreshadowing and exposition. 

By closely studying dialogue examples from writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Tara June Winch, John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, Max Porter, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, George Saunders, Tim Winton and James Kelman, we’ll learn how to craft distinct voices for our own characters, unpacking what makes dialogue ‘click’ in the ears of the reader, and absorbing the strategies used to render each character unique.

Each craft element will then be consolidated during that session, with exercises for you to apply that particular skill to your own work in progress. 

During this course we will also examine how elements such as layout, font, punctuation and the ‘white space’ on the page help to generate our characters’ unique speech patterns – and then we’ll actively apply all these learnings to our own work, refining our dialogue skills as we go. 

 The program includes:

• Two or three specific dialogue elements / craft skills, each week

• Whole-group analysis exercises and deeper discussions of how each element works, and how to apply it

• Writing exercises, applying each dialogue element directly to your own work

• Weekly readings to consolidate your dialogue skills and to continue with, post-workshop

• Opportunities to post your work to the online portal for peer feedback

• Suggestions to help build or sustain your longer-term writing community