Fun and Rewarding Writing Exercise

Wow! Did we have fun in class tonight. Twenty students with twenty awesome dialogue scenes. I was so totally impressed. Beginning through advanced writers make up the class, and they all came up with wonderful stories. Amazing.

For some of you students and anyone else who would like to give this a try, choose one of the stories below (either Bugs or Bigfoot? or My First Example of Courage. Bugs or Bigfoot is a straight dialogue scene, sometimes a little harder to do than the one we did tonight. My First Example of Courage has some dialogue, some scene, some interior monologue, and a lot of narrative.

Before you begin, do the following:

(1) Choose two characters for yourself. They can be fictional or real. Give them names. Know their gender.(If you choose My First Example of Courage you also need an animal.)
(2) Choose a place. Set up the scene.
(3) Choose an event.

In other words. You have these two characters (who?) who are in a place (where?), doing what (what action?)

In Bugs or Bigfoot, I have myself and a doctor in a doctor's office, talking through an exam. In My First Example of Courage, I have myself and my father and my dog in a truck traveling down the road.

After you've chosen your people, place, and happening. Then copy the structure of your chosen story. Wherever your chosen story uses narrative, you do the same. Wherever there is dialogue, you do the same. Wherever there is a beat, put in a beat. Wherever there is a tag, put in a tag. Wherever there is interior narrative, you have your character think. You get the gist. Oh yeah, don't forget to make the scene from ONE character's viewpoint.

I bet you'll be surprised at what you come up with. You may have to set it aside for a while before you'll really see the worth. And no! This does not change your style or mess with it in any way. Twenty people in our class kept twenty styles by doing this. Each person kept their own flavor, but improved their structure.

This is especially helpful when you already have a project and you use characters you've already created. Several students are using their results in their current works. At least one of my students created an entire novel surrounding this one scene she wrote from this exercise.

Do this exercise several times with some of your favorite scenes written by your favorite authors. And, yes, it's okay to expand.

Have fun! And be sure to post in the comment section if you dare share!

More on courage tomorrow . . . yikes! It's after midnight . . . more on courage later today.