Your Daily Writing Prompt

This week’s prompts are all about… wait for it…. dialogue.

I heard that collective sigh.

It’s the same one I hear in my workshops when I announce we will be doing dialogue-writing prompts

You sigh because you don’t have the tools you need to write better dialogue. So we are going to focus on giving you some of those tools this week.

Today’s Writing Prompt

For this exercise, you can use two existing characters or invent two characters. Memoir writers can use two people in your story. Write a dialogue-heavy scene in which one character wants something, and the other character wants something different. Here is the key: Do not have any of the characters say what they want. They hint, they withhold, they verbally dance around an issue, but they don’t say exactly what they want. The first step to writing better dialogue involves knowing what each of your characters wants out of that particular scene.

Writing better dialogue requires knowing what each of your characters wants out of that particular scene and then giving those characters some unconscious subtext by making them not good at communicating exactly what they want.

Here is a mundane example: One character wants to eat Mexican food (that would be me) and the other one wants to eat Indian food.

Here is a more complex example: One character wants to kiss. The other character wants to reinforce that they are and always will be just friends.

You can post your daily writing exercises in the comments section of the blog post if you’d like or you can post on our Facebook group. Or you can keep them to yourself. It’s all fine with me.

Go forth and write,

Nicole

Remember:

You can write about yourself or apply these prompts to your character.
It’s okay to change personal pronouns (he to she or she to I, etc.)
You don’t have to follow the prompt exactly; it’s more important that you get words on the page today.
You can get these daily writing prompts a couple of different ways:
- Visit our blog every day.
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