The following is taken from “Naming the World” edited by Bret Anthony Johnston. This particular exercise is credited to Kathrine Min, the author of Seconhand World. For more information about this author and teacher, please visit her website at: www.katherinemin.com

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How we speak to one another reveals much more about ourselves than the words themselves. The effective use of dialogue in fiction allows our characters to hoist themselves with their own petards. We, as narrators, need not intrude very far to get our readers to understand much of what they need to know through what our characters say.

Most writers lean to heavily on exposition to help them delineate character or advance plot. They mistrust their characters’’ own voices. I find it helpful, therefore, to have students err on the other side. They go from writing a scene in play form, without the benefit of stage directions, to gradually incorporating action and description to support their interaction between two characters.

1. A married couple is speaking. The woman wants a divorce. The man does not. Write a page of dialogue between them. At the end of the page, one of them convinces the other. Use dialogue only. No description, action, or thought.

2. Now write the same scene in exposition. Use no dialogue.

3. Take your original scene in dialogue and judiciously add some of the description, action, and thought that might fill out the scene. Make sure that the dialogue is still doing most of the heavy lifting here.

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