Fiction Writing Workshop #2

Posted by Jennifer Jensen Feb 20, 2008

I just wrote my sixth set of dialogue practice pages, completing the first week’s writing assignment, and the second fiction writing class is tonight. It’s been interesting.

The dialogue pages have been very frustrating to start. I can’t use tag lines or action to set the scene, and yet I don’t know the various characters well enough for them to have a decent conversation with someone. I find myself thinking about characters I’ve been toying with, who would be in what particular situation, etc., but then I wonder who to have them talk to and about, and how to sustain an entire conversation.

At the same time, though, writing dialogue longhand with no purpose becomes very freeing once I get started. I find that characters do evolve, which I expected, but they also morph. My college student becomes a high schooler by the bottom of the first page. When I thought a woman was seeing a specialist about her daughter, it turned out she had cancer herself. An old woman’s grumpiness turned into an actual voice of her own, to me the most successful of the dialogue sets.

And for me, writing early in the day is much easier than writing at midnight!

The pages are sealed in their envelopes, as instructed. I’ll let you know what happens in class.

To read the workshop blogs from the beginning, start with Fiction Writing Workshop #1. Or click here to read the next post in the series.