Writing exercise idea

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I had an idea for the sort of exercise that you can run at workshops or in classes. It may not be useful to established writers who have real deadlines to deal with but who knows.

It goes like this. Record a conversation with a portable digital recorder, your laptop's built-in microphone, or whatever. Find one snippet in there that is good; no more than two or three lines per participant. Transcribe that dialog exchange; the dialog alone. Now, write a scene around it. The scene can be anywhere and there can be any dialog before or after it.

The point of the exercise is to fire up one's creativity and use it to create a scene in which an out of context, but interesting, bit of dialog would make sense.

What do you think?
 

LilGreenBookworm

I write with crayons.
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That sounds pretty interesting to me, and a bit similar to an exercise we did in one of my college courses: we brought in newspapers and went through the classifieds, and picked one item out of the 'for sale' section to create a short story around. My group wrote a story using an ad for a brand new, never used wheelchair.
 

bkendall

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I really like the idea. Keep that in mind. Maybe it could be used in a prompt for our SYW sections. I would have fun doing that. In fact, the story I'm doing for this month for western's December prompt started with just one line of dialogue.