Dialogue by Gloria Kempton Page A

that shows the confrontation and the response of the protagonist to the challenge that she needs to look at something within herself.
    • A wife finds out her husband (protagonist) is attracted to and beginning to spend time with a single woman who is friends with the couple. She confronts him and gives him an ultimatum.
    • A boss tells her employee (protagonist) that she's taking too many coffee breaks and extending her lunch hours, as well as spending too much time on the phone.
    • A mother (protagonist) discovers that her twenty-something daughter is a prostitute who plans to continue as long as there is work.
    Reveals/reminds of goals. Choose one of the three following scenarios and write a two-page scene from the point of view of the character that feels most passionately about his or her goal. The purpose of this exercise is to make sure that the protagonist's goal or intention is evident in the scene.
    • A fourteen-year-old girl wants to go out on a date with a sixteen-year-old boy. This would be her first date, and her parents are against it.
    • A man in his thirties loves to work on old cars, then sell them for a profit. He has at least five beaters plus parts laying all over his yard at any one time. The next-door neighbors are growing increasingly anxious over this. They have a perfect house and a perfect yard.
    • A young, very aggressive woman tries to sell a harried mother of two some perfume in a store parking lot.
    Keeping your characters in social situations. Write a two-page scene of dialogue that starts out with a character alone and in conflict with himself. Then bring another character into the scene and begin to develop the conflict externally as well as internally. Use one of the following settings:
    • a mountain trail • a jail cell • a hospital room
    • a dark alley • a church sanctuary
    [ narrative, dialogue, and action — learning to weave the spoken word ]
    As a new writer, my stories were mostly dialogue. Pages and pages of characters talking. I loved to write dialogue. I don't know that I thought a story needed anything else. I wrote my very first story in fourth grade—a puppet play consisting of nothing but dialogue and a few stage directions. I wrote a lot of skits and plays after that. Dialogue was and always has been my favorite part of writing a story.
    Somewhere along the line, I realized there were other elements necessary to telling stories: action and narrative. Description is also part of a story, but it's really just another form of narrative. While dialogue is the element that brings a story and the characters to life on the page, action creates the movement and narrative gives the story its depth and substance. Dialogue is the characters' words, action the characters' physical movement, and narrative the characters' thoughts about everything going on around them, which can take the form of observation of the setting, other characters, or mental musing on the story situation. Stories need all three elements—dialogue, action, and narrative—to create a three-dimensional feel for the reader.
    Writing a story means weaving all of the elements of fiction together, just like quilters weave the various patterns of their quilts or ice skaters weave in and out of each other on the ice. When it's done right, weaving dialogue, narrative, and action can create a beautiful tapestry.
    why weave?
    Expert weaving of dialogue, narrative, and action is done unconsciously.
    Once we learn how it's done, we don't think about it while we're doing it. We are letting the characters lead us, so we're no more thinking about which element of storytelling we're using than we are thinking about when to use the clutch, brake, and accelerator when we're driving. We just do it. When reading a story, we don't notice whether the author is weaving or not— when it's working. When it's not working, when the author is not doing it, we notice. I can only speak for myself. I