Note sull'episodio
2025 New Year's writing resolution: spend 10 minutes a day getting words on the page.
Today's 10-minute writing exercise is focused on dialogue! One speaker is fully present and the other just speaks, and as usual your anonymish host is writing along. Washing the dishes is no fun, and one of her speakers is wishing for a little help if the other wouldn't mind.
This is a no-homework podcast! Every episode, we build in ten minutes of time for ourselves to do the assignment, and the assignment is always to write write write.
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
You can write to our daily writing prompt, but you could also:
- journal
- brainstorm
- write for your work in progress
All that matters is that you do write and you don't cheat and you don't stop writing until the music comes in.