Dialogue Development Aid Needed!!!

It's easier than you think if your goal is practice rather than sales and performance.

Create yourself a bunch of writing prompts for the basic situation of scenes with two or more people. Try for at least twenty, and make them really general. Print them. Examples:

Mother and teenage daughter argue
Adult son returns to his dying father's side after years of estrangement
Two young teenage boys decide to steal
A woman tells her best friend something she knows will be painful
A man reveals to his wife a secret he's kept for years

Now add a bunch of settings. Print them in a different color ink or on different color paper. Examples:

A beauty salon which has seen better days
A rocky cliff
A garage sale
A high-end department store

Now add some challenges, either specifics about the characters or items which must be involved in the scene. Print in yet another ink color or on another color of paper:

One character is hard of hearing
A large wrench is used during the scene
At least one character is drunk or high
Everyone in the scene is, and always has been, wealthy
Severe weather affects the characters
The characters are of different races or ethnicities
Someone has lost a shoe

Now cut up your print-outs and mix them up. (Got a hat?) Draw one of each category/color and write a scene which meets its requirements. Set yourself a deadline for a first draft. (An hour? A day?) Then work on the dialogue for no more than a set amount of time (Two more hours? Another day?) before you move on to the next one.

Essentially, this will just have you writing scads of dialogue coming from many types of characters. If you write within a particular genre, make sure you include plenty of situations and characters typical of that genre.

And have fun! Nobody has to see these, so you're free to experiment, get a little daring, and take risks that may not pan out.

Maryn, hoping this helps

That's a great idea. Sometimes limitations can actually be the most inspiring as you are forced to confront them and do something with them.

Great advice so far.


I like to take pictures of scenes and pictures of individuals...put two individuals into the scene and just freefall what they would say to one another.

I will be facilitating a mini-workshop type writing exercise next month on this very thing. Coming at dialogue from a playwright pov to improve novel writing dialogue.

Good luck!