Talk to me
Did you make it through March? April’s requirements are more relaxed. Well, sort of. We’re taking away all your expositional dialogue and you’re going to show, not tell, us your story.
Ready?
April’s assignment is: rewrite your story in only dialogue. (Maximum wordcount for your submission: 1,000 words)
The whys and hows:
Last month we took away some of your descriptions. Now we’re taking the rest of them.
The skills you’re going to build:
- Voice. Your characters will need to have distinctive word choices and phrasings if you want readers to tell them apart.
- Show, don’t tell.
- What’s actually important? You won’t be able to make everything happen. And you won’t be able to explain everything. So you’ll need to figure out what in the interactions makes the most sense.
- Perspective. If your story wasn’t dialogue-heavy to begin with, you’re going to have to focus on your characters, and maybe even add new ones. You’ll also need to figure out if you need to do a single scene or more than one, and how you might signal that different people are talking, without any other clues than the words.
Ok but… help.
The good news is, we’ve already done a TON of the legwork for you. Our writing help post on dialogue explores a ton of options for you. The bad news is, that post anticipates that you’ll have dialogue tags.
One way to manage dialogue is to actually roleplay the scene out in a chat window with another writer. Sounds fun? You can write a 450,000-word novel that way. Ask us how we know.
A few tips and tricks we learned on the way:
- Don’t worry too much about fitting everything in. Like the microstory version, you might need to focus on a single important interaction.
- Don’t be married to the dialogue from your original version. Saying things a different way might convey more information (remember this for December!).
- Don’t make your characters sound the same! Some characters swear more. Others use more contractions.
- You might need to add or subtract characters, or change the setting. If you wrote an essay, maybe now you’re writing a scene where you recount what happened to a spouse or friend. If you wrote a narration with no dialogue, maybe now you’re writing the described scenes out instead of summarizing them.
- Watch out for racism. Yeah, sometimes we feel like we shouldn’t have to say this but it turns out we do. When you start getting down to “Lawdy, Miz Scarlett, I …” you’re depending on racist stereotypes to tell your readers about your character. But that holds true in modern language too. And before you reach for the AAVE, make sure you know the nuance of the dialect or have a sensitivity reader who can help you.
Need a second pair of eyes to see what you might have missed? Don’t be afraid to ask for help in the Coffeehouse!
Good luck! Talk to you soon…
Loading InLinkz ...Hindsight!
In case you missed it, here's a look back (see what we did there?) at the exercises in our 2020 workshop.
January: Write a story or essay in 1,000 words
February: Write the same piece in 100 words
March: Retain just 25 adjectives and adverbs from your original 1,000 word story
April: Write your story or essay using only dialogue
May: Write your story or essay from a different point of view
June: Write your story or essay in 2,000 words
July: Write your story or essay out of chronological order
August: Record your story or essay and transcribe it
September: Write your story or essay using a different voice
October: Write a poem using your story or essay as inspiration
November: Write a version of your story set in an alternate universe.
December: Write the final version of your story or essay in 1000 words.
About the author:
Christine Hanolsy is a (primarily) science fiction and fantasy writer who simply cannot resist a love story. She joined the YeahWrite team in 2014 as the microstory editor and stepped into the role of Editor-In-Chief in 2020. Christine was a 2015 BlogHer Voices of the Year award recipient and Community Keynote speaker for her YeahWrite essay, “Rights and Privileges.” Her short fiction has been published in a number of anthologies and periodicals and her creative nonfiction at Dead Housekeeping and in the Timberline Review. Outside of YeahWrite, Christine’s past roles have included Russian language scholar, composer, interpreter, and general cat herder. Find her online at christinehanolsy.com.
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
