Your Daily Writing Prompt

This week’s creative writing prompts focus on writing better dialogue. Every Sunday we start a new theme for the week’s writing prompts.

Today’s Writing Prompt

There’s a lot of talk out there about making sure each of your characters has a unique voice, but there’s not a whole lot of talk about how to give each character their own voice.

Every person has their own way of speaking and so should each character. To give your character a unique voice, you need to understand their diction (speaking style and word choice). A character’s word choice is based on their background. Someone from South Boston might choose different words than someone from Southern California.

Make a list of words that each of your characters (or two invented characters) uses based on their backgrounds, then write a scene in which at least two characters are talking and practice having each character use some of those words. See if you can make each character identifiable solely based on what they are saying, not on the dialogue tags (Jack said, Sally said).

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:
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