Ten-Minute Writing Exercise #37: Direct and Indirect Dialogue

2025 New Year's writing resolution: spend 10 minutes a day getting words on the page.

Today's 10-minute writing exercise is focused on dialogue! We're writing direct and indirect dialogue, and as usual your anonymish host is writing along. One of her characters is boring the other, but which one is it?

This is a no-homework podcast! Every episode, we build in ten minutes of time for ourselves to do the assignment, and the assignment is always to write write write.

Our dialogue exercises this month, with a couple of exceptions, will focus on the mechanics of dialogue writing. The subject of the conversation is less important than the effect of specific mechanistic choices or constraints that we'll be playing with.

For today's ten-minute writing exercise:

Write a back-and-forth conversation between two people who are catching up after they haven't seen each other for a while.

One character's part in the conversation should be written entirely as direct dialogue -- verbatim quotes of the words they say.

Use only indirect dialogue for the other character, where the narrator summarizes what they say with no quotes at all.

Our themes this month are:

• Love in all its forms
• Dialogue
• Comedy Writing Step by Step by Gene Perret

We will also write a complete work of flash fiction together in a week from Feb 17 - Feb 23. No pre-work needed, and as always, zero homework outside of our ten minutes a day. This month we'll use Dan Harmon's story circles method to plan out our stories

You can write to our daily writing prompt, but you could also:

• journal
• brainstorm
• write for your work in progress

All that matters is that you do write and you don't cheat and you don't stop writing until the music comes in.