Dialogue writing exercise: find out whether your dialogue works

What’s going on between your characters lives mostly in your head and doesn’t always come through in your dialogue. Whether a reader picks up on it is something you can’t tell from your own writing. When you do this exercise, you can get feedback right away to see whether you’ve pulled it off in your dialogue.

You probably already know that characters shouldn’t always say what they mean. Give them their own voice, let the subtext do the work, read it out loud. You’ll find that advice everywhere, and it’s true enough, but it’s about how they talk, not why they’re talking in the first place. And that’s exactly where a lot of writers get stuck.

Example: You’ve given both of your characters their own way of talking. But do they also want something different from each other in this conversation?

You think so, but two people who want the same thing can have a beautiful conversation that goes nowhere. And that’s the hardest thing to hear in your own writing, especially while you’re still learning this technique.

In the exercise below, you write one conversation in which two characters each want something different, and neither of them says what it is. Then ViaScripta checks on the spot whether that works.

First you’ll find the instructions. Then you can do the exercise yourself and get feedback right away.

Paste your text into the widget at the bottom of this page. You don’t need an account.

Intermediate exercise: Two people who want something different from the conversation

Write a conversation between two characters who each want to get something out of it, and what they want clashes. Neither of them says what they want. They talk about something else. By the end, the relationship between them has changed, even though neither of them ever says it out loud. Use as few dialogue tags as possible, and none that name the emotion.

• Length: 350 words
• Time: 1 hour

Learning Objective

• Practice dialogue as action, with two clashing goals driving the conversation without either character stating their goal.

Criteria

• Goal: both characters want something out of this conversation, and they can’t both get what they want.
• Indirect: neither of them names what they want; on the surface, the conversation is about something else.
• Shift: by the end, the relationship between them is different from how it was at the start.
• Stands Alone: a reader can follow the conversation without the story around it.

Write your own conversation for this assignment. Three hundred fifty words, two characters who want different things, and neither of them says what.

Paste your response below and get feedback right away on the four criteria. You don’t have to get it right the first time. No one’s looking over your shoulder.

Want more practice? Browse the full list of writing exercises.