Write On This ... Exercise

It's not what you say, it's how you say it.

Bad dialogue can undo all your hard work in writing beautiful prose. It takes a lot of artificiality to create natural sounding dialogue. Take a leaf out of Agatha Christie's books: her dialogue was always crisp, illuminating, and straight to the point; you'd be hard pressed to find a 'so', 'well', and 'oh' in amongst it. Cutting superfluous 'padding' words are the bane of most editors, but you have to be especially brutal when your character's in charge of speaking.

Write
Below is a simple scene scenario for you to turn into a dialogue only scene. Try to ensure you say all you need to say, without going over the top. Remember, a character's speech only has two jobs:


Scene
John is with his best friend Mark. Mark has a confession to make; he is dating John's ex-girlfriend. John is not happy about this. The scene boils down to John issuing Mark an ultimatum: the girl, or the friendship.

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