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IWW
Practice-W Exercise Archives
Exercise: Dialogue (Version 3)
These exercises were written
by IWW members
and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its
members.
You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that
you found
them at the Internet Writers Workshop
(http://www.internetwritingwor
kshop.org/).
Prepared by: Alex Quisenberry
Posted on: Sun, 9 Sep 2001
Reposted on: Sun, 12 Sep 2004
Reposted, revised, on: Sun, 2 Sep 2007
_____________________
Exercise: In less than 400 words, write a scene including two
characters in conflict.
Use dialogue heavily to make the reader see the conflict and learn
something of the
characters' personalities.
_____________________
Using dialogue in their works is one of the more difficult skills
writers must master.
Dialogue is not the presentation of words in the manner we speak them.
Few of us
steadily use complete sentences in our daily speech, and our written
dialogue would
tend to sound stilted and unrealistic if we used them there. On the
other hand,
dialogue written exactly the way people talk would be full of "uh" and
"ah," starts
and stops, "I mean," and all the rest of the oddments we throw in to
keep our
conversations going. Writers have to learn how to make dialogue sound
realistic,
even though it is far from what one would hear in a taped conversation.
Dialogue can show us a great deal about the people speaking and the
circumstances
in which they are interacting. In this exercise, make dialogue the main
vehicle for
telling your story.
_____________________
Exercise: In less than 400 words, write a scene including two
characters in conflict.
Use dialogue heavily to make the reader see the conflict and learn
something of the
characters' personalities.
_____________________
In your critiques, consider how much you learned about the characters
and their
conflict, and how well the writer used dialogue to convey that
information.
Web site created by
Rhéal Nadeau and
the administrators of the Internet Writing Workshop.
Modified by Greg Gunther.
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