Breaking Up Dialogue

by Mary C. Long

​It's never easy to write dialogue, but once you start it IS easy to get lost in it. In class, kids were broken into small teams and given writing prompts from which needed to write an ALL dialogue back-and-forth between at least two characters (or running internal dialogue) and then discuss what could be improved in the story and why. The goal was to realize context was important, and breaking up the pace of the rapid back and forth with some character thoughts and setting not only advance the story, but keep the reader interested. Some kids took it a step further and revised their pieces, but the back-and-forths were fun to read, as most of the prompts were crazy. ​

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