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 writing a conversation that's really about something else, and as usual your anonymish host is writing along. She has to admit that she got her core idea from a Reddit post.

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 scene where a coup ...