I am normally not a fan of writing exercises. I often think that, like going on writing courses, it’s a way of treading water while actually not doing the work itself.
However, on reflection, if carefully designed I think they can at least raise a writing issue in the mind of the writer, without necessarily solving anything. And that gives them a certain value.
For instance, when trying to teach about the importance of conflict in narrative, it might be useful to give someone dialogue to write in which conflict is not explicit ( ‘I hate you!’ ‘I hate you too’) but concealed or deferred ( ‘Do you like my new dress?’ ‘I like all your dresses’). This may not teach you how to do it - but it will at least have you perhaps bear it in mind when you are writing.
With that caveat, here’s an exercise I have designed to keep certain principles in mind when you are writing. There is an option to post your exercise for feedback if you go to the link beneath the paywall.
The dialogue I often read when people send me manuscripts is all too often dead on the page. This is because people mistake dramatic dialogue for a lot of the dialogue we experience in real life. That is a request for information, or the imparting of information, or meaningless gossip, or banter or speechifying.
In dramatic dialogue, the words should be doing more than they appear to be doing. Yes, there is a simple case for ‘information dialogue’ when it comes to exposition, ‘Where’s Peter gone?’ ‘He’s just left to visit his mother’ ‘Great. Then we have time to …….before he gets back’). But mostly, dialogue should work to reveal character, or desire, or to move the plot forward in some way. And yes, conflict should be in there somewhere. But as most people don’t enjoy conflict, they bury it almost completely - ‘almost ‘ because they want to get their message/complaint across while maintaining deniability. As in ‘Do you like my new dress’, ‘I like all your dresses’. It’s plainly not true that the person answering does like all the woman’s dresses, they just want to wriggle out of a difficult situation, i.e. that they hate the dress. And in order to buy time they say ‘ I like all your dresses’. It probably won’t work but it’s worth a try.
So here’s the exercise. Two characters - it can be a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a child, whatever - are in a room together. Any room. Both of them want something, but they don’t want to admit they want it.
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