An exercise in writing dialogue today.

Your character (or their child) feels ill, so your character phones their medical center to get time to see the doctor.  The receiptionist says the best she can offer is two weeks away - the character (or their child) is in pain and so your character isn’t willing to accept this, nor are they feeling the need to hide their feelings about it.

Write the dialogue scene between the character and the receiption from the time the medical center receptionist answers the phone to your character.

Read it back aloud.  Does the dialogue “flow” as a real conversation would, or do you need to tweak the language so that it fits regular speech patterns rather than a grammatically correct scene that would be great in a text book but does nothing to bring life to the characters in the scene?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 1:00 am and is filed under Creative Exercises. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.