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 back-and-forth conversation between two people who are trying to drive in an unfamiliar city. For the first two lines, put the dialog tags at the end of each person’s speech:

“You’re going the wrong way,” she said.

For the next two lines, put the dialog tags at the beginning. For the next two, don’t use any dialog tags. Then, put the dialog tags in the middle:

“The problem with traffic circles,” he said, “is no one knows how they’re supposed to work.”

Repeat this cycle — start, end, none, middle — as the conversation continues. Notice how the placement of the dialogue tags affects the rhythm of the scene.

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.