Three scenes from a Dialogue class
Please to enjoy three scenes I wrote last semester for Karl Iglesias’ Dialogue class. The class was enjoyable and very instructive, it was the first proper writing class I’ve taken in years. It was also the first time writing for a specific goal on deadline in a while.
Most of these short scenes were created for specific exercises in creating believable, real sounding dialogue, so other dimensions I would have developed were de-emphasized. There are a few I think were successful outside of the framework of the class, that can mostly stand alone, but please keep in mind with the exception of the previously shared Queen Elvis scene, these are all quick and dirty efforts to do what the instructor was asking.
For example, Karl asked us to write a scene around a conflict over a notebook, where one person wants a notebook the other character won’t give up. The assignment was to write what evolves naturally out of this. This became my fun, pseudo-scientific scene the Scroll
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Formerly from AAA to BBB came out of an exercise to write a short scene without character names or much description. The goal was to write dialogue in a way that the characters can be clearly identified simply by what they say. The characters for the assignment were to be called AAA and BBB. I added the names later.
The last one is really two scenes: the first one called Fuck-ups Phone home and the second He Bleeds on her Leather. The assignment concerned conveying exposition without sounding stilted, and to avoid on the nose dialogue, while also presenting conflict and letting that drive the words. Anyone that’s known me for 15 years or so will know the source for this material, and there will be more of these folks, whoever they may be . . .
So each of these were little microcosm, little movie dialogue experiments with varying levels of effectiveness outside of the laboratory of the classroom. It was also useful because I leaned some screenplay formatting, I’ve only ever written in playwriting form when writing screenplay sketches.
PDFs as the screenwriting format & wordpress weren’t playing nice. Mildly NSFW, language.
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