Our dialogue exercises this month, with a couple of exceptions, will focus on the mechanics of dialogue writing. The subject of the conversation is less important than the effect of specific mechanistic choices or constraints that we’ll be playing with.

For today’s ten-minute writing exercise:

Write a conversation between two people about washing the dishes, or another mundane subject you prefer.

For one participant’s lines, write only the words they speak and dialog tags as needed (“he said,” “she asked”).

For the other, you may write both the words they speak and sentences describing their expressions, actions, and thoughts.

Our themes this month are:

• Love in all its forms
• Dialogue
• Comedy Writing Step by Step by Gene Perret

We will also write a complete work of flash fiction together in a week from Feb 17 – Feb 23. No pre-work needed, and as always, zero homework outside of our ten minutes a day. This month we’ll use Dan Harmon’s story circles method to plan out our stories.