Dealing with dialogue

Write ten lines of dialogue between two people, using a mixture of taglines [ blah, blah,” he said.), action
description (“Blah, blah.” She said this while twirling a dark lock of his hair), simple placement (“Blah,
blah.” This was the first time he’d ever talked directly to her.], voice description [blah, blah.” Her voice
sounded distant, as if drifting from a far-off forest.], Tom Swifties [blah, blah, “she yelled with
excitement]. Keep each tag short.

Okay, now take what you’ve written and insert three to five sentences after two of the tags. This can
describe something interfering with the normal dialogue [Before she could answer him thunder from a
nearby lightning strike made them both jump.] or simply a time/spatial holder [It wasn’t that he really
believed what he was saying. It was that her way of holding her body at an angle made him think she was
lying and needed to be put down. Actually, she was three times gorgeous.]
Creative writing usage:

A) Commas and periods go inside of closing quotation marks in American usage. EX: “I
watched her rinsing her hair,” he said. [In British usage, they go outside.]

B) You can and should use contractions when you are writing speech; otherwise, the
character’s speech will sound stilted. EX: “No, Jimmy, I can’t give you five dollars for a glass
of beer.”

C) Taglines are often necessary to identify which character is speaking, but you needn’t use
them for every time a person speaks. Try to use your common sense. Read Hemingway’s “A
Clean, Well Lighted Place” to see how the omission of taglines can confuse a reader. [Though
overall, that is a wonderful story.]

D) Stephen King advises avoiding adverbs. I concur; find the right verb. EX: “She laughed
heartily at his joke.” Use something like, “She guffawed at his joke.” Or, “She spilled her beer
while laughing at his joke.”

E) Common usage dictates writing a character’s name at the beginning of every paragraph to
avoid confusion. This isn’t always necessary, and pronouns somehow pull the reader into your
story more. Just use your common sense: if there is a chance of confusion, repeat the character’s
name.

F) Double space between your lines. Though this may seem wasteful and horribly hurtful to
trees, it does allow your reader to insert corrections. It also gives your reader some breathing
room. However, when you write a poem, use single space, as convention dictates.

G) Don’t use weird fonts, or use them sparingly. Script, for example, is very hard to read.
You might use it briefly, however, to indicate some handwritten note. And, when your character
is having a direct thought, put it in italics. EX: “She looked at the guy who’d just asked her to
the prom and thought, What a dufus. How am I going to get out of this?” Note that the first letter
of her direct thought is capitalized. Also, note that direct thought is typically in present tense.

H) Again, in American usage, a new speaker gets a new paragraph. Occasionally, when
you’re reporting brief dialogue in the past you might get away without doing this. But if you’re
not sure, just do it. EX
“I’m thinking about killing myself, rather than going to the prom with that creep,” Mary
whispered.
“Really? I think he’s cute. The way he drools is fascinating,” Mary’s friend Jane replied,
giving Mary a grin.
“And don’t forget how his underwear is always showing,” Paula cut in, overhearing
them. “It’s sweet.”
“Good, it’s settled. One of you can go with him.” Mary proffered the creep’s phone
number, which was written on a piece of paper with what they all hoped was a ketchup stain.

I) Some versions of Microsoft Word, in their wisdom, have decided that every new
paragraph should have a blank space separating it from the previous paragraph. This works only
for business letters, which you aren’t writing. Go to your tool bar, find “paragraph.” Click the
option with arrows pointing up and down and then click “delete space after paragraph.”

J) One trick to check for consistency with any one character’s speech patterns is to go
through what you’ve written and read only the dialogue where that character speaks. Check that
it sounds the same, that the vocabulary and the rhythms remain consistent.

K) Try to intersperse descriptions—either of the setting or of a character—in your dialogue.

Your pages shouldn’t look like the manuscript to a play. To confirm this, skim several novels
and you will see that it is so.

L) Don’t buy into “writer’s block.” If you force yourself to sit before your computer and just
type gibberish, your better half will become angry and sooner or later start typing non-gibberish.

K) Use your spell check before handing in your work.

Exercise:

Author 1: Within your first ten or so lines, have something dramatic occur, a shot, a
slap, an explosion, whatever. This needs to be something that ultimately will have a human
cause. You could, for example, have a bridge collapse, but the cause could be a drunken architect
or whatever. You need to introduce at least one character, not more than two.

Author 2: Continuing with above, take one of the characters given and move him or
her back in time, probably at least a day, but much more if you want. You may also move them
to another place, as well. If you were given two characters, make it clear which one we are going
to follow; that is, make one of them the central character. If you were given only one character,
introduce another in the past time and place.

Author 3: Introduce a conflict between these two characters, a conflict that could
conceivably lead to whatever happened in the opening paragraph, though considering your space
and time, conceivably will be the key word. You needn’t be explicit, in other words.
Exercise 14-C

The mist floated so thickly at her eye level that she thought she could even see droplets
suspended in the cool morning air. She shivered and hugged her bare arms, wishing she’d
remembered a sweater or at least a hot cup of something. A yellowed leaf floated downward and
she waited—ridiculously, she realized—for the sound of it hitting the grass.

Now a character arrives. Write at least seven lines of ensuing dialogue, interspersing more of the
given setting, from the same female persona you’ve been given. Use one of the following moods
to control the dialogue and her perception of the setting, which may or may not change. You
should have about a page of writing:

Aggression Concern

Condolence Confusion

Consolation Informative

Congratulatory Jovial

Sexual overtones Anger

Inquisitive Flirtation
Description

Use three or four sentences, from either a first person or limited third person viewpoint and convey some
mood, anticipation, mystery, sadness, misery, or elation, whatever. Use at least two senses. Label each mood
before you begin, For example:

SADNESS: He knew the door would be heavy, even before he moved to open it. What he hadn’t
expected was the absolute chill of the brass knob. Just how much had the weather changed overnight?
Nowhere near as much as his relationship with Andrea. He grimaced and leaned to shove the oak door open,
having to lean into it, and not at all surprised, once it was open, to find an absolutely gray morning and heavy
snow clouds awaiting him.

Describe a back yard:

A) Sight
B) Smell
C) Sound
D) Touch

Describe an afternoon:
A) Touch
B) Smell
C) Sound
D) Taste (a simile will work)
E) Sight

Describe a body of water:

A) Touch
B) Smell
C) Sound
D) Taste
E) Sight

Describe a night:
A) Touch
B) Smell
C) Sight
D) Sound
Voice, setting, character
First Person: Using two characters that you might employ later in a story. Write an exchange of
dialogue between them, letting them each speak at least three times. Accompany this with five or
so lines (sentences?) of description or exposition with description.

Second Person: No dialogue. A paragraph of exposition, description that might affect

positively or adversely the import of the dialogue. When you’re finished, hand it back to first
person.

First person: Write your own descriptive exposition, to go before your dialogue. You
may either take the Second Person’s hint or ignore it for your own idea.

Hand back to second person:

Viewpoint:

Preliminary: A) Write two sentences in direct thought or speech by a character from above.
(Different speech, of course.) B) Now write the same in indirect thought or speech, limited third
person. C) Now write the same in indirect thought or speech, using an authorial voice.

Actual Exercise:
Bill isn’t wearing a belt, and his pants are too large around the waist. He’s stretching to open a
window and his anatomy begins to show. There are two women about his age in the room.

1. Bill’s vp only

2. Two girls’ vp (separate/shared)

3. Authorial, comic or serious OR 5.

4. Omniscient, non-judgmental

5. Fly on the wall, which often is same as authorial and will surely have to be comic OR 3.
In addition to imitating a story or poems, do the following. Keep a copy, since it might give
you some inspiration for your story.

Take the story that you are thinking about writing and do at least two of the following:

A) Take the setting or one of the settings where the story will take place and describe it in a
page. Be sure to use at least four senses. (Sight, taste, smell, touch, hearing). You aren’t
committing yourself to using any of these words, but I would like you to commit to using this
setting. And why not do this through your protagonist’s viewpoint?

B) Take one character from your story and write about something that happened to him or her at
least five years before the story that you are going to write takes place. Again, about a page.

C) Take a second character from your story and write about something that happened to him or
her at least five years before your story takes place. Just 100 words for this one.

D) Take something familiar to you, say the Pledge of allegiance. Write it exactly—using
phonetics if necessary, how your main character would say it. About 100 words. Now, I’d like
you to use phonetics heavily, more heavily than you would use it in a story.
Example: Ah Plaidj ahleejunse tew thee flaig uff thee YewNighted Staits uff Amairicuh.
No one in his right mind would write—or read!—anything written this way. But I want you to
get a feel for the character’s speech patter.
Another example:
I . . . um . . . pledge a . . . leegiance to the flag . . . of the, you know, United States of, you
know, America.
Bill isn’t wearing a belt, and his pants are too large around the waist. He’s stretching to open a
window and his anatomy begins to show. There are two women about his age in the room.

1. Bill’s vp only

2. Two girls’ vp (separate/shared)

3. Authorial, comic or serious

4. Omniscient, non-judgmental

5. Fly on the wall, which often is same as authorial and will surely have to be comic
 Creative Writing Exercise 5
Three different approaches to opening with dialogue. A opens with a single question, steps out of the narrative time to
give some personal history, then returns, depicting a scene. B opens completely outside the story, with a factoid, if you
will, though that factoid has implications for the following piece of dialogue. After the dialogue, the story backs up in
time and another depiction of a scene. C sets a scene and a character, then a piece of dialog, then moves into the
story’s first movement. D works with indirect and direct dialogue. Use all four of these strategies in something of your
own.

A) “Marriage?”
In the fourteen months that I’d known her, this was one of the few times I’d ever heard her extend into a full sharp
note. Blues being her specialty, she normally twisted half-flats east and west, north and south, bending her beautiful
voice like a guitar player bending strings clear across the continent.
I waited. She was standing by my bookcase fingering The Egyptian Book of the Dead and wearing one of those
moonlit silvery gowns common to her visits. She cocked her hips into the shelving, which sent a crack! through the air.
This of course caught my attention, but when my gaze shifted longingly to her mid-section, she didn’t show that
conquering smile you’d expect from a woman who has so disrobed a male’s inner impulse—no, she frowned instead.

B) A medieval folk belief suggests this approach for shedding stray witches encountered along the road: talk, talk;
make them argue with you; keep talking, about what, no matter. A continuous patter of nonsense so frustrates any
witch, the belief holds, that her true nature is revealed and she must scuttle off.
“So, I mean, what are you telling me?”
John Wortham is asking Shelly this a second time. Shelly glares. From where John stands inside his house and
behind his screen door, her head seems to glow with an almost supernatural greenish haze. The screen refracting sunlight
couldn’t cause that, could it? he asks himself.

He looked through the Greyhound’s window to the blackboard schedule outside, to a motionless clock, then
back to the blackboard schedule. It was Kansas City, Kansas, 1959. It was 12:10 p.m. in Kansas City, Kansas. He
placed his ear against the Greyhound’s window and imagined that he could hear each wondrous sway of the
schedule in some thick summer breeze; he imagined he could hear the echo of chalk being scratched on the schedule
outlining important places, important times; then he pictured a handsome man like the movies say, a man standing
straight as a chalk stick itself, as straight as his sergeant in Texas.
--Kansas City, Kansas, the bus driver sang out.
He opened his eyes and saw that the clock had not moved, that the schedule hung dead still. He left the bus and
walked to the YMCA

And don’t forget: all of your dialogue needn’t be directly quoted, just as thought need not be:

When Clarissa walked into my used bookstore I was instantly enthralled. She stood five-feet six-and-a-half
inches, but with her loopy gray eyes she might as well have bestrode me like the Colossus of Rhodes bestrode that
island. Or like the twin towers once bestrode Manhattan.
“Come here,” she chanted from the Social Sciences section, only to hold me off with a raised, pure palm when I
attained half the distance to her lean body. No doubt seeing my disappointment—perhaps when I teetered over a
warp in the oak floor and my sorrowful countenance fell—she cooed, “Oh come closer, my little Zeno.” So I was
coaxed to halve again that precious distance to her selfdom. And again, and again, not so much with her words but
with her undulations, until the pungent warmth of her body seemed but an inhalation away. Oh will it ever be, I
wondered as she waved the book she was holding, a dense monograph on bone classification, asking where I’d
gotten it. Clarissa explained that she had come in for this very work, having heard from a graduate student that I had
it in stock. I in turn explained that I had recently bought the book off a tall man with a long graying beard that
reminded me of Methuselah—that is, should Methuselah ever exist.
“There’s always someone breathing oxygen and nitrogen who thinks he’s Methuselah. And just what would it
matter if he really was?”
Oxygen and nitrogen be damned. I was so close that I could smell her perfume, whose scientifically emitted
pheromones burrowed into my pelvic cradle, bypassing nostrils and even stomach as if they pumped irrelevantly in the
matter.
These are opening paragraphs of novels or stories. Write a second paragraph for one, imitating the voice.

“May your lordship know, first and foremost, that my name is Lazarus of Tormes, son of Thomas Gonzalez
and Antonia Perez, natives of Tejares, a village near Salamanca. I was born in the river Tormes, from which I
took my surname, and this is how it happened. My father, God forgive him, had been a miller for over fifteen
years, and one night when my mother was in the water-mill, pregnant with me, she went into labor and gave
birth to me on the spot. So that I can truly say that I was born in the river.”
From Lazarillo de Tormes, anonymous

“The action begins in Rota. Rota is the smallest of those pretty towns that form the great semicircle of the bay
of Cadiz. But despite its being the smallest, the grand duke of Osuna preferred it, building there his famous
castle, which I could describe stone by stone. But now we are dealing with neither castles nor dukes, but with
the fields surrounding Rota, and with a most humble gardener, whom we shall call Uncle Buscabeatas (or old
Hag-Chaser), though this was not his true name.”
From Alarcon’s “The Stub Book”

“The girl (myself) is walking through Branden’s, that excellent store. Suburb of a large famous city that is a
symbol for large famous American cities. The event sneaks up on the girl, who believes she is herding it along
with a small fixed smile, a girl of fifteen, innocently experienced. She dawdles in a certain style by a counter of
costume jewelry. Rings, earrings, necklaces. Prices from $5 to $50, all within reach. All ugly. She eases over
the glove counter, where everything is ugly too. In her close-fitted coat with its black fur collar she
contemplates the luxury of Branden’s, which she has known for many years: its many mild pale lights, easy on
the eye and the soul, its elaborate tinkly decorations, its women shoppers with their excellent shoes and coats
and hairdo, all dawdling gracefully, in no hurry.
Who was ever in a hurry?”
From Joyce Carol Oates’ “How I Contemplated the
World from the Detroit House of Correction and
Began My Life Over Again”

“Murphy’s drunk on the bright verge of still another Christmas and a car door slams. Then he’s out in the
headlights and in bed waking up the next afternoon with Annie kissing his crucified right fist. It’s blue and
swollen, and when he tries to move it, it tingles, it chimes and Annie says, How did you hurt your hand. Did
you hit somebody?”
From Mark Costello’s “Murphy’s Xmas”

“I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it
again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I stared at it
in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped
in the darkness which roared outside.”
From James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

“You’re a real one for opening your mouth in the first place,” Itzie said. “What do you open your mouth
all the time for?”
“I didn’t bring it up, Itz, I didn’t,” Ozzie said.
“What do you care about Jesus Christ for, anyway?”
“I didn’t bring up Jesus Christ. He did. I didn’t even know what he was talking about. Jesus is historical,
he kept saying. Jesus is historical,” Ozzie mimicked the monumental voice of Rabbi Bender.
From Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews”
Darl
Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of
him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above
my own.
The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and backed brick-hard by July, between the
green rows of laidby cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the
cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading positions.
 From William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
Page 2
Eréndira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of her misfortune began to blow. The enormous
mansion of moonlike concrete lost in the solitude of the desert trembled down to its foundations with the first
attack, But Eréndira and her grandmother were used to the risks of the wild nature there, and in the bathroom
decorated with a series of peacocks and childish mosaics of Roman bath they scarcely paid any attention to the
caliber of the wind.
From Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The Incredible and Sad Tale of
Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother”

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a
gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armour-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little
he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed-quilt
could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were
pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.
From Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”

Chapter 1
Dr. Sheppard at the Breakfast Table
Mrs. Ferrars died on the night of the 16th-17th September—a Thursday. I was sent for at eight o’clock on
the morning of Friday 17th. There was nothing to be done. She had been dead some hours.
It was just a few minutes after nine when I reached home once more. I opened the front door with my
latchkey, and purposely delayed a few moments in the hall, hanging up my hat and the light overcoat that I
had deemed a wise precaution against the chill of an early autumn morning. To tell the truth, I was
considerably upset and worried, I am not going to pretend that at that moment I foresaw the events of the
next few weeks. I emphatically did not do so. But my instinct told me that there were stirring times ahead.
From Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Dave struck out across the fields, looking homeward through paling light. Whut’s the use talking wid em
niggers in the field? Anyhow, his mother was putting supper on the table, Them niggers can’t understan
nothing. One of the days he was going to get a gun and practice shooting, then they couldn’t talk to him as
though he were a little boy. He slowed, looking at the ground, Shucks, Ah ain scareda them even ef they
are biggern me! Aw, Ah know whut Ahma do. Ahm going by ol Joe’s sto n git that Sears Roebuck catlog n
look at them guns. Mebbe Ma will lemme buy one when she gits mah pay from ol man Hawkins. Ahma
beg her t gimme some money. Ahm ol ernough to hava gun. Ahm seventeen. Almost a man. He strode,
feeling his long loose-jointed limbs. Shucks, a man oughta hava little gun aftah he done worked hard all
day.
From Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”

“Marriage?”
In the fourteen months that I’d known her, this was one of the few times I’d ever heard her voice extend into a full
sharp note. Blues being her specialty, she normally twisted half-flats east and west, north and south, bending her
beautiful voice like a guitar player bending strings clear across the continent.
I waited. She was standing by my bookcase fingering The Egyptian Book of the Dead and wearing one of those
moonlit silvery gowns common to her visits. She cocked her hips into the shelving, which sent a crack! through the air.
This of course caught my attention, but when my gaze shifted longingly to her mid-section, she didn’t show that
conquering smile you’d expect from a woman who has so disrobed a male’s inner impulse—no, she frowned instead.
 ANG EX A. Take the following emotions or ideas and create a sentence using either a simile or metaphor, or
simply a sentence eliciting the idea without overtly stating it. The emotions to use are hope, freedom, isolation,
despair, uncertainty.

Examples for the emotion of love:

Her love had turned from a dew-dipped rose into a moss-ridden stone.

His heart leaped toward the brown-eyed woman like a bee sighting a trellis of summer roses.

Even from a distance, the sight of her made incense fill his lungs, until he found it harder to
breathe than to simply hobble toward her.

Her figure played on his confused mind like a hot jazz combo, like a silky and rough saxophone.

Looking at him, she felt her feet slipping, as if she were of a sudden
stranded in a loose earth that she feared might turn to quicksand.
CW Exercises, page 1
FICTION, CREATIVE WRITING—TAYLOR

Imitate the tone and style of two of the following, without parodying the same:
A. from Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”:
None of them knew the colour of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves
that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white,
and all of them know the colours of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at
all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.
Example:
For example: Neither of them knew the colors in the bedroom. Their eyes glanced level at the curtains of
the open window as a breeze swept toward them. The breeze seemed cool at first, though a damp chill lay
underneath. Both of them knew the color of that chill. As the curtain lifted, their bedroom seemed to narrow
and widen, dip and rise—but at all times its edge remained jagged with a love that was lost, like a ship
stranded on rocks.
B. from Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana: (please note that the word “nigger” as used by a character is
shifted to Negro by the narrator, the difference being . . . ?)
“That nigger going down the street,” said Dr Hasselbacher standing in the Wonder Bar, “he reminds me
of you, Mr Wormold.” It was typical of Dr Hasselbacher that after fifteen years of friendship he still used the
prefix Mr—friendship proceeded with the slowness and assurance of a careful diagnosis. On Wormold’s
deathbed, when Dr Hasselbacher came to heel his failing pulse, he would perhaps become Jim.
The Negro was blind in one eye and one leg was shorter than the other; he wore an ancient felt hat and his
ribs showed through his worn shirt like a ship’s under demolition. He walked at the edge of the pavement,
beyond the yellow and pink pillars of a colonnade, in the hot January sun, and he counted every step as he
went. . . .
C. from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”:

I am Gimpel the fool. I don’t think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that’s what folks call me. They
gave me the name while I was still in school. I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, glump,
ninny, and fool. The last name stuck. What did my foolishness consist of? I was easy to take in. They said,
“Gimpel, you know the rabbi’s wife has been brought to childbed?” So I skipped school. Well, it turned out to
be a lie. How was I supposed to know? She hadn’t had a big belly. But I never looked at her belly. Was that
really so foolish? The gang laughed and hee-hawed, stomped and danced and chanted a good-night prayer.
And instead of the raisins they give when a woman’s lying, in, they stuffed my hand full of goat turds. I was no
weakling. If I slapped someone he’d see all the way to Cracow. But I’m really not a slugger by nature. I think
to myself: Let it pass. So they take advantage of me.
D. from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine:

On Sunday morning Leo Auffmann moved slowly through his garage, expecting some wood, a curl of
wire, a hammer or a wrench to leap up, crying, “Start here!” But nothing leaped, nothing cried for a beginning.
Should a Happiness Machine, he wondered, be something you can carry in your pocket?
Or, he went on, should it be something that carries you in its pocket?
“One thing I absolutely know,” he said aloud. “It should be bright!”
He set a can of orange paint in the center of the workbench, picked up a dictionary, and wandered into the
house.
CW Exercises, page 2

E. From Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa:

I’m riding along with Tristessa in the cab, drunk, with big bottle of Juarez Bourbon whiskey in the till-
bag railroad lootbag they’d accused me of holding in railroad 1952--here I am in Mexico City, rainy Saturday
night, mysteries, old dream sidestreets with no names reeling in, the little street where I’d walked through
crowds of gloomy Hobo Indians wrapped in tragic shawls enough to make you cry and you thought you saw
knives flashing beneath the folds—lugubrious dreams as tragic as the one of Old Railroad Night where my
father sits big of thighs in smoking car of night, outside’s a brakeman with red light and white light, lumbering
in the sad vast mist tracks of life—but now I’m, up on that Vegetable plateau Mexico, the moon of Citlapol a
few nights earlier I’d stumbled to on the sleepy roof on the way to the ancient dripping stone toilet—Tristessa
is high, beautiful as ever, goin home gaily to go to bed and enjoy her morphine.
F. From Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”:

The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east
Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her
only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal.
“Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the
other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the
Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I
wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I wouldn’t answer to my
conscience if I did.”
Bailey didn’t look up from reading so she wheeled around and faced the children’s mother. . . .

F. From A.S. Byatt’s “The Glass Coffin”:

There was once a little tailor, a good and unremarkable man, who happened to be journeying through a
forest, in search of work perhaps, for in those days men travelled great distances to make a meagre living, and
there services of a fine craftsman, like our hero were less in demand than cheap and cobbling hasty work that
fitted ill and lasted only briefly. He believed he should come across someone who would want his skills – he
was an incurable optimist, and imagined a fortunate meeting around every corner, though how that should
come about was hard to see, as he advanced farther and farther into the dark, dense trees, where even the
moonlight was split into dull little needles of bluish light on the moss, not enough to see by. But he did come
upon the little house that was waiting for him, in a clearing in the depths, and was cheered by the lines of
yellow light he could see between and under the shutters. He knocked boldly on the door of this house, and
there was a rustling, and creaking, and the door opened a tiny crack, and there stood a little man, with a face as
grey as morning ashes, and a long wooly beard the same colour.
‘I am a traveller lost in the woods,’ said the little tailor, ‘and a master craftsman, seeking work, in angy is
to be found.’
‘I have no need for a master craftsman,’ said the little grey man. ‘And I am afraid of thieves. You cannot
come in here.’
CW Exercises, page 1
EXERCISE ONE:
First Person: Give four to six exchanges of dialogue (between two
people, no more) with nothing other than tag-lines with or without
gestures or facial expression—or even omitting tag lines. Nothing
directly about the surrounding environment, though you may
insinuate it through gesture, if you care to. (For example, shivering or
wiping sweat from brow.)

Second Person: Either give a paragraph of setting, OR a paragraph

about one—only one of the characters. For tonight, a paragraph
means at least five sentences. If you do setting, be sure to follow any
cues that may have been given in the previous dialogue and tag lines.

Third Person: Whichever choice was made (setting or character) by

the writer preceding you, choose the other option and write another
paragraph of at least five sentences.

Fourth Person: Insert more dialogue for sure, but mix in whatever
else you want. Do not feel a need to come to a conclusion, though if
there has not been a conflict introduced yet, you should certainly
introduce one at this point.
EXERCISE TWO:

First Person, paragraph one: Give a setting without giving away anything at
all of the character. In other words, use omniscient voice. Don't forget that
humans do experience things with senses other than their eyes. Also, you may
put something in about time—nothing, however, about the character(s), not
even its sex(es).

Second person, paragraph two: Your job is to read the above and introduce
the main character, giving hints of his or her past, sex, age, position in life,
and any other pertinent factors.

Third person, paragraph three: Your job is to introduce a complication.

Why is the character here? Has something just occurred? Does something
occur in this paragraph? Does another character enter? Has something
occurred years before? Is something expected to occur?

Fourth person, paragraph four: Your job may be the hardest and also the
most untrue to form. Skip all the boring middle (ha!) and give a conclusion or
resolution, taking note of all three of the above.
EXERCISE THREE:
First person: Take an object—automobile, house, pet, collection, or another person—and explain how that has
defined your character through some period of time. Use first person-narration, either in dialog or stream-of-
conscience.
Second person: Introduce a firm narrator—not the character in question above—plus this conflict: whatever
defined that character has somehow become inaccessible, either destroyed, lost, or dead—or perhaps the
character has changed. How has this loss affected the character, at least according to your new narrator.
Third person: Skip some time—a week, a month, a year—and start dialogue with the narrator and the first
character, a dialogue that indicates some new change may have taken place, but be vague about what it is.

EXERCISE FOUR:
First person
Go with your instinct and take the first smell that comes to memory from a time of no fewer than three years
ago. Write an opening paragraph around that smell. Use first person.

Second person
Change the above to limited third person, giving other details from other times about your character: e.g.,
"She hadn't always felt this way about the smell of leather. As a child, her father worked in . . .

Third Person
Change the above to a second character observing—either unseen or as a friend or as a casual bystander—the
first. This will in effect make your narrative omniscient. Have this second character make some judgment
about the actions of the first. The judgment does not have to be a correct one, remember.

EXERCISE FIVE:
First Person: Write six to ten lines of dialogue between two people.
Second Person: Take the above dialogue; insert thought and setting that put the dialogue in completely
different perspective. You could, for example, make it clear that one of the characters is lying. Or that one is
angry. Change no dialogue.
CW exercises, page 2

EXERCISE SIX:
Write a story (parable? fable?) in the format of "Death Speaks," your handout. Pay attention to scene shifts,
setting, and resolution—considering the length.

EXERCISE SEVEN:
First person
1. Write six lines of poetry that somehow employ rhyme.
Second person
2. Rewrite them into eight without any rhyme.
Third Person
3. Rewrite them into four lines.

4. Underline all your concrete images. None? Bad, very bad!

EXERCISE EIGHT
First person:
1. Take any image or phrase from your inheritance above, and write at least four lines of poetry, rhymed or
free verse, around it.
2. If you rhymed in number one, destroy the same in this part. Contrawise.
3. Meld the two together into a couplet or triplet.

Second Person: Answer the above couplet or triplet with one of your own. This by the way, is a valid
Japanese form of poetry wherein friends exchange letters in rhyme, answering one mood or image with
another.
 370/470 TEST ON TERMS FOR POETRY AND FICTION
1. Define omniscient viewpoint.
2. What word inevitably comes up in first-person narration in fiction?
3. Define conflict.
4. Define resolution.
5. Define and give an example of alliteration.
6. Define assonance.
7. Give a definition and example of rhyme.
8. Give a definition and example of slant rhyme (or off-rhyme).
9. Give an example of a run-on line. (This is also referred to as an enjambement.)
10. Define consonance.
11. Iambic is by far the most common metrical pattern in poetry and speech. Define iambic and
give a one-foot example.
12. What is a foot, as far as poetry is concerned?
13. Shakespeare wrote many plays in unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse). What does this
mean as far as the constitution of his typical line?
14. Roughly when was accentual-alliterative verse primarily used in English poetry?
15. What is a couplet? tercet? quatrain?
16. Define open-ended, insofar as fiction is concerned. Define closed ending.
17. What or who is a poem's persona?
18. What poet used sprung rhythm? What device did he often use to achieve this?
19. Internal rhyme is one method of making your rhyme less obvious. Give an example in two
lines of poetry. (Your own doggerel is acceptable.)
21. What does in media res mean?
22. Define a limited third-person voice.
23. What does motif or leitmotif mean?
24. How do American authors normally indicate a change of speaker in dialogue?
25. Give an example of an end-stopped line.
26. What is a stanza?
27. What is a canto or fit?
28. Define free verse, including both what is not and what is normally expected of such verse.
29. Define lyrical poetry.
30. Define narrative poetry.
31. Define meter.
32. British and American poetry used to be primarily accentual-syllabic; now both are primarily
accentual. Restate this. See #13 for a clue.
33. Define timeline.
34. Define epiphany.
35. Define untrustworthy narrator.
36. Define deus ex machina.
37. Define authorial intrusion.
38. How does some contemporary American fiction indicate a character's
direct thoughts are being stated, other than italics?
39. How do you indicate italics on a typewriter or in a handwritten ms.?
40. What is internal rhyme?
42. What does white space indicate in prose?
Writing Exercise 7

You need to know more about your characters than the reader does!

1. Take a secondary character, re-tell one day, one event of your story from his/her
viewpoint. (two paragraphs).

2. Take your major character, set him/her in a completely different, much earlier scene, with
some dialogue. (two paragraphs)

3. Take a relative or close friend or lover, and have them describe your main character to
another friend.

4. Write a lengthy paragraph about your imaginary lover, using religious language to
describe her/him, and your feelings about her/him. Give this paragraph a setting, downtown
Birmingham, etc., wherein you are thinking.

Imitate the opening two paragraphs of Joyce’s “Araby,” using some place from your childhood.
Note that Joyce’s first paragraph is—for all practical purposes—done in omniscient voice, and it
is not until the second paragraph that we know the story is in first person.
1. On page 558, imitate the two paragraphs that begin with the word “both," changing the
couple to a much younger age—or to a single young person, for that matter. You will be
imitating the negative approach of the paragraphs, so re-read them before starting.
1. On page 561, imitate the rhythms introduced by the parentheses and the use of rhetorical
questions. Change the subject matter.
DEATH SPEAKS: There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to
market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and
trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled
by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that had jostled me.
She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I
will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there
Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted
it, dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the
merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and
he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant
when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was
only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an
appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

--W. Somerset Maugham