Note to Instructors

By completing the following assignment, students will:

• Gain experience crafting and embodying characters of their own making
• Use dialogue as a means to teach the reader something about the story, to increase tension, and/or to elicit emotion
• Practice writing a scene with original characters and dialogue. 

The assignments were posed as weekly “Writing Experiments” and were intended to be low-stakes and graded for completion, encouraging exploration and experimentation over “right answers” and perfection.

Instructions

This three-step assignment is intended to be low-stakes, generative, and engaging. By the end of it, you’ll have created two characters and written a scene where they have a dialogue together. The purpose here is not to create a masterpiece (though feel free to do so!); rather, the idea is to practice character development, scene-writing, and creating meaningful, purposeful dialogue.

Part 1

Write a one-paragraph character sketch of at least two distinct characters of your creation who inhabit the same world. (If interested, check out example sketches here.) When writing, think: what makes this person who they are? Think beyond the physical (“She has brown hair and she’s tall”)—what are this character’s goals and motives? Personality quirks? Backstory?

Part 2 

Once you have an idea of who each character is, answer at least five of the following questions in the first-person point of view, first from one character’s point of view, then the other’s: 
 

• Who are you? 
• Who do you want to become?
• Who do you need to become? 
• Who do the people around you want to become?
• What is the most important memory you have about food?
• What is the most important thing you’ve ever held? 
• Where have you been? Where do you need to go? Why do you need to go there?
• What’s stopping you?

Part 3

Now that you know your characters a little better, let’s bring them together into conversation! Imagine a reason that your characters would have for interacting—does one of them want or need something from the other? Do they have a common enemy? Do they work together?

Now, write a dialogue-focused scene where the dialogue does at least one of the following: 

• Teaches us about one/both character(s) and/or about the world in which they live 
• Increases tension 
• Elicits emotion from the reader