#dialogue exercise

“Sometimes I wanna hurt.”

“…why?”

“Because I think I deserve it.”

“You don’t deserve it.”

“No — I do. And even if I don’t, I still want it.”

“Well…I’m not gonna hurt you.”

“I’m not asking you to…but if I did, would you? Just a little?”

“…”

“Would you?”

“…”

“Would you—”

“Yes, okay?! Yes, I would…if it’s what you wanted, I would.”

“…you’d do anything I say, hm?”

Write down some interesting things you hear throughout the day or week, and then use a few of them to create a small conversation with a... at least semi-coherent story

My lines: "I didn't know they gave diplomas to dead people." "I am ascending." "In conclusion, I am a kleptomaniac with short term memory loss."

The Charm Bracelet 

"I was so bored in class today! I ended up counting counting cars on the road outside." My friend told me. 

I responded with some advice, "You should be paying attention though, if you ever want to graduate." 

"I didn't know they gave diplomas to dead people." She said. 

"Wait, what?" I asked in confusion. Then I remembered, my friend's been dead for thirty years! 

"I am ascending!" The ghost of my friend said as she rose into the air, leaving behind her charm bracelet. I picked it up, and after looking around to make sure my friend wasn't around, put it in my pocket. 

Dogs are Smarter Than People, Writing Exercise, Cool Submission Opportunity So, we’re been talking about dialogue in novels lately and tips about it and the purpose of it. To find any back posts, just head to LIVING HAPPY and search “dialogue.” One of the things that some writing stylists talk about is the three-beat rule, which is credited to Screenwriter Cynthia Whitcomb. Reedsy explains…

“Orange rinds,” said Burney, up to the arms in filth. Someone in the thick cavern darkness, Les or Maxim maybe, went, “Really?” He nodded, his thick chin pressing into a warm half-moon at the height of his chest, a gesture for no one in particular. We all had our own shit to sift through.

“Yeah,” he said, quietly, and then once the thunder of his voice had returned, “Yeah. Just something about them, you know? They feel like something trying really hard to be skin.” A beat, a slow-rolling sift of trash and bones from Burney’s place midway up the midden. “Not that I don’t like oranges. Love ‘em. I’d have a Terry’s Chocolate on my desk every Christmas. It’s just the packaging, you know? The presentation.”

“Would love an orange rind right now,” said a voice in the darkness. Definitely Maxim; I could hear his wistful lisp at the end of the sentence, the tonal signifier of his ascent into imagination. ”I’d slice it very thin and boil it with the sweetest thing I’ve got. Or just as a tea, drinking the juice. Just for the memory of it.”

“What the fuck, Max?” echoed a voice from the far end of the cavern. Apex, further away than we thought they’d gotten, so distant that their usual thoughtless shouting dimmed to an echoing average. “You could daydream about anything. You had a chocolate orange right there. Boiling orange rinds?”

“Eyes on the prize, boys and girls,” said Burney, some ancient managerial impulse stirred to life by the barest threat of social decohesion. “Let’s keep the game going. Les, you’re up next. Name a question and a trigger.”

I could hear Les rifling through a drift of cloth, somewhere above and to my right. There was a plastic click, and then the lime green reading light Les used as an ersatz miner’s lamp clicked on, illuminating the bottom half of her pale, round face. Off again, something clinking into the bottom of a bag. You navigated by feel, in the piles, but sometimes you had to check. Lights weren’t, couldn’t be a constant thing down here. You had to be circumspect.

“Okay. Okay. The question is this. What’s been your greatest failure? And the trigger is the first two people who find something that would be worth more than fifty dollars on the surface,” she said. It was quiet, but the enormous chamber made all sound both sourceless and intimate. I could hear the grinding, gastrointestinal slosh of Maxim’s hungry stomach. Far and away, I could hear Apex breathing hard, no longer muffling their exertion into the tattered black T-shirt they wore like an oversized ascot.

We had to do these things, this obscene crossbreed between work song and online quiz, or then we’d be alone with each other, in the dark, nothing to think of but the foul work we were doing and how we came to be here.

It went quiet. I rooted through my own slice of detritus, letting the question circle in the back of my brain. This kind of scavenge-work was wholly sensory. You felt, you smelled. You ran your fingers around the edges of metal cylinders and over the faces of plastic squares. You felt along long, thin spans of dry and flakey material, testing with taps of your fingers, feeling for the knobbly ends of bone. Sticks were useless. Bone meant, maybe, a whole skeleton, and they might have something good in their pockets.

We all had our methods. I wore a rubber gardening glove over my right hand, nothing on my left. Burney was safety-focused, wore a pair of jaundice-yellow oven mitts over cheap, dollar store skeleton gloves, valuing his nine remaining fingers over touch accuracy. When Apex first started with us, they’d used a rake, noisily dragging the trash out onto a flat section of cave floor and then going over it quickly with a light; that had lasted until the tines caught in the grill of an ancient, leaky riding mower. Unsalvageable but for the blades.

Bit by bit, in frantic half-seconds each, lights bloomed in the darkness. Burney, working by candlelight carefully screwed into the shelf edge of a firetruck-red plastic coffin, pulled out bits and pieces with his yellow oven-mitt crab hands, holding them to the light for inspection. Maxim, working with a square, grey LED flashlight lashed to his head with a bandana, clicked it on for long sweeps over vast drifts of trash, his whisper-thin body a photo negative silhouette. You heard more of Apex than you saw of them, but they had the Maglite; when they needed it, huge blares of luminescence shone like a foghorn made visible over piled grit, sludge and bodies. No sense of smell, you see, so they had no trouble working with the newer dead.

A rustling below me. A careful series of grunts. The square window of an LED headlight blossomed, remained on. It illuminated an unquestionably nice overcoat. Blue wool, oversized, definitely floor length. No belt, but still with a full line of bright buttons down the front. Maxim stuck his arm through the collar, hung it on his forearm like an ersatz clothes hanger. It had suffered for its time in the midden, but it had no visible rips or tears. Everything else would wash out.

“Shit,” Maxim said, “I think I’m number one.”

“You’re up, kid,” said Burney. We all stopped, or at least slowed our scavenging to listen. Maxim worked his arm through the sleeve, hung the heavy greatcoat over his thin shoulders. The empty left arm kept its shape, filling out his asymmetrical silhouette. It couldn’t possibly get dirtier as he worked, after all.

“I almost killed my sister,” he said.

“Aw,” said Les, “That’s sweet.”

“No, that’s not... This isn’t coming through very well. I almost killed my sister. I didn’t fully kill her. That’s the mistake,” he said.

The work, perfunctory as it was, slowed to a stop as Maxim spoke. Even enlarged as he was by the coat, it was hard to imagine Maxim intentionally doing harm to anyone. He just had that affect to him, a dreamer’s quality. He was like the ghost of a priest, drifting through caverns as if they were confessionals, wanting to understand people, wanting to forgive people. With this assertion, he had made a stage for himself.

“I had one sister, younger than me by three years. My parents, they had to work very hard for us, to make it look like everything was okay. They didn’t want any of us to be thrown away, not at first, so not long after my sister was born, both of them had to go back to work. They tried to work it out so that one of them would be home all of the time, but there were always a few hours each day when it was just me and her. They tried to teach me everything I would need to take care of her, but I was very young. Four, maybe, or five. Young enough to be very stupid, to not have older experiences, to be able to translate them into new ideas.”

“Compared to everyone else, our pool was very small, but I loved it. I would have lived in it if I could. And one day my parents were out, and I wanted to show my sister this thing that I loved. I watched my father splashing her up and down in the pool and thought that I could do the same thing. The idea that I was smaller and weaker than my father did not occur. I was made from him, so I could do anything he could do. Of course, i dropped her a few times. She floated once or twice, but sank, too. And I didn’t notice. I was just so happy to be in the water, sharing the thing I loved with someone I was responsible for. Like feeding your dog chocolate. I just wanted her to feel the joy I felt.”

“She was lucky that my mother came home when she did, and that her work’s hospital subscription was very good. The oxygen deprivation hadn’t been debilitating. She would still be able to walk and talk. But after that, everything my parents had went to her. They were so afraid of losing her that they gave everything to keep her. And as she grew older, she knew this, too. All she had to do was stay away from home for half a day and they would do anything to bring her back. I don’t think they resented me for almost killing her. After a while, life got so hectic that I don’t think they even remembered. ”

“I don’t resent my sister. She was just trying to live as best she knew how. I don’t resent my parents, either, but I was always the person that they knew they could rely on, and she was always the person that they knew they could lose. There were big consequences and little ones. When the credit report came in, when one of us had to be thrown away, there was no question who it would be. But even before that, they knew that I would forgive them for missing my birthday, where they knew that she would not. Her crying was an emergency, while mine was an inconvenience.”

“I wonder, sometimes, how things would have been if I had fully killed her. Maybe, instead of relying on me, my parents would have hated me. Maybe they would have forgiven me, or just the same as it happened in truth, forgotten. But, at least, the credit report - the one that said that the world could only afford to bear one of my parents’ children - that wouldn’t have changed anything. I wouldn’t be down here. I wouldn’t have accepted it. I wouldn’t have thought it was okay to forget me, because then, I wouldn’t have been used to being forgotten.”

The silence had a different texture when Maxim stopped speaking. There was a downward drift of garbage, up and to my right. I saw a heavy body sliding through the glare of Burney’s candle. Les came into Maxim’s headlight like a burgundy rhino, both arms wrapping around the thin man, enfolding him. “I’m so sorry, you’re okay,” she said, but he doesn’t move. Just stands there, still, waiting for it to be over.

I looked up, past the tip of the cold, clogged heap of human refuse that I must, again, soon, begin digging through. Up to where the cover has been pulled over the cave mouth, blocking even the memory of starlight, leaving us down in the dark. I didn’t want to filter Maxim’s experience through my own, but I couldn’t help it. Old memories drifted outside the cave cover, locked away, never to be seen again.

Odd Prompts: Special Delivery

A snip of something for the prompt, don’t know if there is more.  *** “We should have turned back there.” He announced, squinting through the windshield. “I’m pretty sure we’ve come too far.”  “I think you’re right.” Bonnie twisted around to look behind them. The wet ribbon of the road twisted out of sight. She settled back into her seat, as they went around another curve. The forest was thicker…

Dialogue Exercise Amateur Séance It's time for a Halloween special! Write about a scene where a character or group of characters is trying to contact spirits. How do they go about this? Are they doing this for fun or is there a more serious purpose? Who are they trying to contact and do they receive a response?

Dialogue Exercise Some Party, Right? Write a scene where two characters meet for the first time at a party. Does one engage in conversation first? How do they get along and what do they talk about? What does their body language show that their words don't?