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! We're using alternative verbs, and as usual your anonymish host is writing along. She's having flashbacks to seventh grade, when she learned the exact opposite of the current conventional wisdom. Styles change! Tools are forever.

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  ...