Reference · first published November 8, 2026
By Michael Gullo
The Drip is told almost entirely in dialogue. A narrator appears in 5 of the first 12 chapters and is retired after Chapter 12. After that there is no narrator and there are no speech tags.
I call the method mimetic tagless intimacy. The characters speak with no space between the words and the reader.
It isn't memoir. It's mimetic. Real people had real parts, distilled to beyond accurate. They would do the things I say they did, but they didn't do them. Plenty of the characters are whole cloth.
The form allows the character to carry the whole freight of a story.
It doesn't simply work. It's better in almost every way: more story in less space, no narrator nagging, endless opportunity for repeat, adverbs almost impossible, no superfluous description, characters with far more complexity, and characters more present simply by having most of the language.
The adverb rule is the transitive result of the tag rule. Once there are no tags, there's nowhere for an adverb to stand.
The writing requirements the form betters: economy, foreshadowing, characterization, setting, continuity, suspense, ambiguity, participation, judgment, voice, pacing, realism, rereadability, teachability, stakes, tone, irony, subtext, perspective, immersion, theme.
Not only plot, theme and conflict are built over time. Character traits and scenes are too. That makes even a pedestrian story a little more intelligent, for the writer and the reader.
After finishing the book, you're halfway to the screenplay.
After two years of hard living without writing a word, I wrote a character breaking every rule as a way of remembering the rules. Doing it, it hit me harder than ever that some rules don't just stretch. They're dead wrong. So I started a book that broke all of them on purpose, and it kept breaking them.
Classroom rules repeated without understanding become fetishes. Fowler called them superstitions in 1926.
I don't just break the redundancy rule. I use the broken rule to inform the reader. It's not a rule. It's a tool.
It's broken in a complex pile of ways so the stitches don't show, not the same way every time.
A personality trait can't be narrated once. It has to be evaluated, so it repeats. Every reader misses a lot.
A narrator could state a trait once and say "there he goes again" two or three times. The form repeats it each time with a new character, a new staging, a new version.
Small, fast repeats from different speakers are repetition, not redundancy. They survive the cut. They're one of the load-bearing piers of the form.
The phone calls open "Hey." / "Hey." and close "Love." / "Love." every time. In a tagless book that's the reader's only cue that it's a call. Varying it 38 ways would mean 38 ways to know it's a call, and it would devolve into redundancy anyhow. Fowler named that fault: elegant variation. The repetition carries the separation of two people who finally found each other.
Nothing appears on the page without first being planted.
The whole book is tucked in: the seeds of every chapter, forward, backward, and solved in chapter.
Seeds spread early and throughout accrue evenly. A late cluster reads as a late idea.
The form allows a third kind of thread: one seeded backward into an earlier chapter after the payoff was written. Conversations start mid-stream, so the insertion is easy. In narrative, seeding back takes narrator blabber, and a narrator jammed in when it isn't his turn sounds an offbeat note.
I call the weave interconnected independence. Connections run end to end, yet many are dispensable and uncuttable at once. If the reader kept the earlier line, they get a deep emotion. If not, the story still goes on.
Many lines carry more than two loads.
I write those background connections like sea water. They come for free, missing them doesn't hurt, but catching them is a reward.
Attribution is carried by voice, tic and ladder, never by tags.
The book never uses the same attribution crutch twice as rooms grow: a fingerprint at six speakers, a pair at seven, a roll call at nine, a vocative with a dashed background channel at eighteen. I created this whole epistemology, and it's the deepest reason the book is special.
In a crowded room, sometimes it doesn't matter who said a line. It needs to be said to move the story. I know every speaker. The page pins the ones that matter.
I tolstoy my tagless. The most insignificant character deserves a voice and identity of his own.
Early in the book, interruptions cut sentences. Later they cut subjects, the way a waitress interrupts.
The characters are the ultimate show, not tell. Some telling is unavoidable, but I kept it quarantined.
In a dialogue book, speech is action. The only way for readers to see the doing is to hear the did and the doing.
The book takes away nearly all clothes and appearance, and anything shown is immediately interpreted, often in conflict. It still judges the people, on their actions.
The reader judges. As author I control what evidence is shown, and it can be prejudicial, but rather than state my preferred read, I accrete it over time.
The book never tells the reader how to feel. Melodrama is a sin to me. Grave things run at maintenance dosage, never suppressed and revealed. Steady accretion, never crescendo.
On traps, I write the damning thing on purpose, know its effect, and then try to write out of the trap.
Compare The Drip only to untagged books. Bringing in tagged dialogue muddies the comparison. Puig is two speakers. There are precious few of us. I stand alone on crowded, legible, untagged dialogue.
Gaddis is chaos. I reined in the chaos. JR's form gained neither readers nor writers. His density hid how easy it is to plant a forest among his huge trees.
The Drip is a living transcript. Its one dash channel at the family lunch is a one-time wink to Gaddis.
The book is a conceit on judgment and punishment above all else, including the cost of not handing punishment out. Punishment punishes the punisher.
The allegory runs in strata: punishment, judgment and forgiveness; Eden walked backward; race and class; grace and works; the natural world. They're all related in harmony.
At the foundation, it's still me writing to me.