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Sally Rooney, globally bestselling and award-winning author of Intermezzo, Normal People, Beautiful World, Where Are You and Conversations with Friends
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Literary Fiction
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How to Write Like Sally Rooney

Elsa Doig
Elsa Doig
September 29, 2024
Elsa Doig

As Community & Events Manager, Elsa oversees all workshops, classes, and live events for up-to-the-minute insights from across the publishing industry. Managing more than 40 live workshops and group classes every month, Elsa also ensures the smooth running of our writers’ online home at The Novelry Live. Previously, Elsa gained experience at literary agency Peters Fraser + Dunlop, Deliciously Ella, and the EmpowHer Society. Elsa has an MA (first class) in English Language and Literature from St. Andrews University.

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September 29, 2024

From the early hours of Tuesday, September 24, readers formed lines outside bookstores in excitement and reverence to the blue monochromatic display in their windows. Promised behind the window, the most hotly anticipated book of the year with one of the biggest publicity campaigns in recent times: Intermezzo, the fourth novel by the generation-defining author, Sally Rooney.

How to Write like Sally Rooney, the author of Intermezzo
Intermezzo © Faber & Faber

After the beaming success of Rooney’s book-to-television adaptation of Normal People and the less well-received Conversations with Friends, it’s safe to say that global phenomenon Sally Rooney is one of the most discussed, revered, reviewed, and influential authors of this generation.

In spite of—or perhaps because of—the rather singular environments (universities or otherwise academic/literary institutes) and characters (young, Irish and erudite), readers recognize a universality inherent to her novels. In the slips of communication, the inexplicable complexities of familial relationships, and the constant intrusion and immersion of the virtual world into the real, Rooney has captured a cultural moment with precision and exactitude: her characters discuss the real concerns of a young generation, many of whom lined up to claim an Intermezzo tote bag and thus identify with Rooney’s demographic.

Since the publication of her debut, the removed and omniscient writing style so innate to Rooney has been hailed as an exemplum to aspiring writers.  

What is it about Sally Rooney’s writing style, then, that elicits reviews like ‘utterly perfect’ (Guardian) and ‘exquisite’ (Vox), and leads critics to question whether there is ‘a better writer at work right now?’ (Guardian).

In this article, The Novelry explores the reaction to Rooney’s Intermezzo, including the opinion that this latest novel is Rooney’s most formally innovative yet. In order to understand this claim, we look toward Rooney’s earlier novels that showcase her distinctive writing style. By examining Rooney’s stylistic techniques and conventions, The Novelry demonstrates how you, a writer, can learn to write like Sally Rooney.

Who is Sally Rooney?

Born in 1991, Sally Rooney published her first novel while studying for an MA in American Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. Her short stories have appeared in Granta, the Dublin Review, the Winter Pages Anthology, the White Review and the Stinging Fly. Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, was published in September 2024.

She is the author of four novels: Intermezzo, published in 2024, Beautiful World, Where Are You in 2021, Normal People in 2018, and Conversations with Friends, her debut novel, released in 2017.

global phenonemon Sally Rooney, author of New York Times bestselling literary fiction novel Intermezzo published September 2024
Sally Rooney © Jonny L. Davies

Intermezzo: Sally Rooney’s best novel yet?

The story concerns two grieving brothers, Ivan and Peter Koubek: the former is a 22-year-old chess prodigy embroiled in a romance with an older woman, the latter a glib elder brother and Dublin lawyer in his thirties, stuck in two antithetical relationships with his first love and an erratic young college student. As the novel opens after their father’s death, Ivan and Peter’s bereavement seems to be the only thing that unifies them.

At its simplest interpretation, the narrative explores how much one life can change in grief’s wake. When socially awkward Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman, their relationship develops rapidly amid their grief and personal turmoil. Margaret’s own turbulent past emerges in the interactions between her character and Ivan.

Where Rooney’s last novel Beautiful World, Where Are You avoided interiority in favor of an entirely detached, ‘glassy’ following of the central characters, Intermezzo devotes significant space to tender and intimate reflections upon grief.

According to NPR, Intermezzo is Rooney’s most moving novel yet. Similarly, Lillian Fishman writes in the Washington Post that Intermezzo ‘overflows with emotion,’ with each element of the novel—its length, theme and style—showing ‘less ruthless restraint’ than Rooney’s prior works.

Perhaps this more emotionally informed writing style weighs heavier on the page than the economic prose of Normal People: readers might find it less of a page-turner, USA Today predicts, with interior monologues offering a far more frantic and pontificating perspective than previous Rooney characters.

Sally Rooney addressed the ‘formal experimentation’ of Intermezzo in an interview with the New York Times.

[The formal experiments] strictly come out of not only character but scenario. With this one, as soon as I conceived of Peter, the older brother character, I wrote down what is now the first page of the novel almost instantly, and it has hardly changed.

[...] I think that I’m so committed to being with my characters that I sense myself as an almost passive observer following their conversations and their interior monologues.
—Sally Rooney

This pull toward formal experimentation is, then, borne out of Rooney’s profound understanding of her characters rather than a decision made before writing. 

If Intermezzo is formally distinctive to Rooney’s previous novels, what is it about Normal People, for example, that establishes her individual style so clearly?

Normal People

Following the formative relationship between Connell and Marianne from teenage years to young adulthood, Normal People is, arguably, Rooney’s most defining work.

At its core, it is a love story—even if some readers challenge the question of whether Marianne and Connell are in love.

But it is also a thematically rich portrait of getting older—a bildungsroman—and how we gradually develop our understanding of relationships, with all their minute inequalities and miscommunications.

Normal People was listed for the Booker Prize and remains one of the most popular literary fiction works published in recent times. Readers grow intimately familiar with the central two characters, Marianne and Connell, thanks in part to the restraint Rooney applies to developing her supporting cast. Perhaps this is why the television adaptation was so successfully received: Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal captured and heightened the same intensity between the two characters that Rooney develops from the start of the novel.

Marianne and Connell written by global phenomenon Sally Rooney
Normal People © BBC Press Office

The opening lines of Normal People immediately demonstrate Rooney’s literary style, with its characteristic minimalism and film-camera-style capture of the situation.

Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell. She’s still wearing her school uniform, but she’s taken off the sweater, so it’s just the blouse and skirt, and she has no shoes on, only tights. 

Oh, hey, he says.
 
Come on in.
 
She turns and walks down the hall. He follows her, clos­ing the door behind him.
—Sally Rooney, Normal People

In these lines, there’s no sleight of hand, nothing hidden, nothing to signify one thing or another; it is a style that echoes what Orwell called ‘prose like a windowpane.’ Rooney says what she sees without apparent subterfuge or subtext. She establishes who we are, and where we are.

With Marianne’s name and perspective opening the novel, Rooney directs us toward the narrative of transformation that we can expect from the story.

This style of sequential moving images defines the prose of Normal People, and Sally Rooney’s style more generally. For writers, this technique can help ease some pressure. You are not the performer on stage. You are behind the camera, simply choosing what to show when.

Conversations with Friends

Sally Rooney’s debut novel established her reputation as one of the finest novelists writing today. Although mostly positive, reactions were divided—as Rooney’s work tends to inspire—but the evident lucidity and candor of Rooney’s prose, impressive and recognizable, led to its commercial success and television adaptation with Joe Alwyn and Jemima Kirke.

Conversations with Friends: two very different women, complicated relationships and romantic entanglements
Conversations with Friends © BBC Press Office

Set in Dublin in the early 2010s, the story concerns four central characters and their entangling relationships: two university students, Frances and Bobbi, and an older married couple, Melissa and Nick. Bobbi and Melissa grow infatuated with one another, while Frances and Nick fall into an affair that leaves the characters questioning if it is possible to love multiple people at once.

With the popularity of Conversations with Friends came the familiar question so closely associated with these novels, marking an essential quality to Rooney’s work: why does Sally Rooney not use quotation marks?

While there are arguments to be made about the fluidity created by avoiding punctuation marks, Rooney excludes them from her work because, as she says, she doesn’t see any need for them. This reflects the exact, deliberate, and minimalist writing style of Rooney, as well as the centrality of dialogue in Conversations with Friends.

Really, Intermezzo and Conversations with Friends share Rooney’s commitment to character overall, to allowing the complexities, inconsistencies, and vulnerabilities of her characters to lead, with the omniscient narrator quietly moving the camera for the reader.

Sally Rooney’s choice to avoid punctuation marks also points toward her blending of communication styles. Aptly titled, Conversations with Friends includes text chains between the characters—conversations that would feasibly happen over text today, but probably shouldn’t.

For example, see the following messages between the older, married Nick and the young poet Frances:

Nick: if we never actually see one another

Nick: then the affair just consists of like

Nick: worrying about the affair

Nick: do you see what i mean

me: I can’t believe you’re breaking up with me over instant messenger

me: I thought you were going to leave your wife so we could run away together

Nick: you don’t need to be defensive
—Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

Rather than shying away from technology, Rooney utilizes the emotional potential of this form of instant communication that is so familiar to readers today. She uses that instant form of communication to demonstrate the stakes for these characters and how precariously they rest upon a mere conversation. The juxtaposition between the implied gravity of the situation and the medium of communication (a lit phone screen in the dark) effects the imbalance of emotional commitment between each character.

Writers shouldn’t be afraid to allow the virtual world to emerge in their novels. It is a tool that can be used to great effect—as demonstrated by Sally Rooney not only in Conversations with Friends, but also in the email communication of Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You.

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Published in September 2021, Sally Rooney’s third novel similarly follows the lives of four characters as they navigate various iterations of love. There is also the sense that Beautiful World, Where Are You provided a chance for Rooney to engage further with the philosophical questions raised in her earlier novels: her characters ponder ethical questions concerning wealth, art, beauty, and the ever-present backdrop of global political and humanitarian crises.

Alice, a young and successful novelist, meets warehouse-worker Felix on an awkward Tinder date (as aforementioned, Rooney doesn’t shy from modernity). Despite the immediate disconnect between the two, Alice brings him with her to Rome, marking the beginning of an interesting (if not awkward at times) relationship that neither of them really understand or seek to define.

Meanwhile, Alice exchanges lengthy, meditative emails with long-time friend Eileen, an editorial assistant at a literary magazine, herself navigating a relationship with her enduring first love (or crush), Simon.

Despite the frequently long interludes of emails between Alice and Eileen, Beautiful World, Where Are You maintains the crystal-cut prose found in Normal People and Conversations with Friends. It offers and attempts to answer plenty of complex, thoughtful questions, and outside of the email exchanges, refrains from exposing any character’s interiority—a task achieved in Rooney’s use of the third-person narrative voice.

Sally Rooney’s writing style

Sally Rooney clarifies her writing process and her decision to keep moving the camera, as it were.

My ethos when choosing scenes was to zoom in when something changes or shifts in their dynamic. Every time we meet them, I want to meet them at a moment of crisis or change... It was like a game that I was playing to see how long I could keep it interesting for myself.

I kept meeting them at junctures where there was still something there worth exploring.
—Sally Rooney, interview with Oprah Daily

Writers of literary fiction consistently praise Sally Rooney’s handling of characters. Tara Conklin, author of New York Times bestselling novels The House Girl and The Last Romantics, considers Sally Rooney a ‘magician.’

I think what strikes me most vividly about her novels is her ability to parse emotions with surgical precision so that even those that seem most routine (a romantic crush, for example) become captivating and utterly new.
—Tara Conklin

Mahsuda Snaith, author of The Things We Thought We Knew and an Observer New Face of Fiction, attributes Sally Rooney’s skill to:

... not giving a lot away about character motivations and really holding back on explaining why people are behaving the way they are. You only get fragments and have to fill in the blanks with what you think might be happening, and it’s that mystery that pulls you through.
—Mahsuda Snaith

Another leading force in the literary fiction genre is Evie Wyld. Evie’s latest novel The Echoes was published in 2024 to critical acclaim and considered a ‘masterly achievement’ (Guardian). She is the only novelist ever to have won both the Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Prize for fiction in Australia. 

What I’ve always loved about Sally Rooney’s work is the centrality of intense female friendship. Though it has led to some people—mainly Will Self—labeling her work as adolescent or somehow lacking in literary complexity, I think that says far more about how highly a certain sort of literary figure values the interior worlds of women. To have a writer such as her who is both loved by readers and critics can only be an extremely good thing.
—Evie Wyld

At The Novelry, our team of bestselling literary fiction authors often refers to Sally Rooney’s technique when coaching writers. Understanding the chapter structure of Normal People, for instance—action, backstory, action—is a useful way to plan and conceive of your own chapters to avoid excessive detail and keep the attention focused on your central characters.

If you are seeking to outline your next novel to achieve literary acclaim and commercial sales, why not consider The Advanced Class? In these lessons, Sally Rooney’s technique is dissected even further, offering opportunities for writers to understand the behind-the-scenes of the most successful literary fiction novels of recent times.

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Key techniques from Sally Rooney

In summary, writing like Sally Rooney requires you to:

  1. Stay committed to the characters above all else. Let them lead the form.
  2. Think of yourself as a passive observer.
  3. Remember ‘prose like a windowpane’: exercise restraint with metaphors and similes.
  4. Don’t shy away from modernity and realism. Use social media and technology as a tool to increase the stakes.
  5. Choose your perspective depending on how much interiority you want to include—third person, camera-style, seems to be Rooney’s most recognizable style.

What to read if you like Sally Rooney

Naturally, the first option is to pick up a copy of Intermezzo. To recap, this story follows two grieving brothers: Peter Koubek, a successful Dublin lawyer, and Ivan Koubek, the socially awkward chess prodigy.

Peter was once apparently unassailable, but in the early weeks after the death of his father, he enters one complicated relationship then another—and becomes intensely intertwined with both his first love Sylvia and college student Naomi.

Ivan, a 22-year-old competitive chess player, meets the older Margaret while grappling with his grief. Intermezzo follows these relationships and the complex experience of bereavement in another exquisitely moving story set in Ireland.

If you have not yet read Sally Rooney, try Normal People. At The Novelry, Normal People is a Hero Book for those writing literary fiction or romance and is a stunning portrayal of the intimacy of first love.

For another novel detailing the complexity of grief and family relationships, try Anissa Gray’s Life and Other Love Songs. Published in 2023, this novel follows a father’s sudden disappearance, exposing the private fears, dreams, longings and joys of a Black American family in the late decades of the twentieth century.

For more insights into literary techniques, coaching and a supportive writing community, join us on a creative writing course at The Novelry—the world’s top-rated writing school.

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Elsa Doig

Elsa Doig

|

Years experience

As Community & Events Manager, Elsa oversees all workshops, classes, and live events for up-to-the-minute insights from across the publishing industry. Managing more than 40 live workshops and group classes every month, Elsa also ensures the smooth running of our writers’ online home at The Novelry Live. Previously, Elsa gained experience at literary agency Peters Fraser + Dunlop, Deliciously Ella, and the EmpowHer Society. Elsa has an MA (first class) in English Language and Literature from St. Andrews University.

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