Do You Need to Practice Dialogue? Try This Prompt

I admit it, I hate dialogue.

I hate it.

I love writing stories. I love narrators and writing from the stream of consciousness of a character's perspective. My dialogue is typically economical and purpose-driven. It gets my characters from one plot point to another, but it is rarely the point of any portion of a story.

Perhaps it's an innate childhood fear of quotation marks, when to capitalize or when to create new paragraphs within a conversation and other grammar rules. Or maybe it's that I don't feel confident that my speaking characters sound authentic or different enough.

Also, it's because I like putting history and mental musings and random unexplained histories into my character's observations. These are not things that work as well with speech as they do with thought (or maybe they do and I'm just not vocal enough). And I want to get better at having my characters speak with more subtext.

I need to challenge myself. As I do, I would love to see if anyone else would be willing to join me.

Here is the premise:

Give a (very) quick introduction about any actions leading up to the story's beginning. In this introduction, a character must share surprising information with at least one more person. Immediately after this, they are put in a situation where they must have a bigger conversation with additional people who are not aware of the secret. The characters who know the information have to try to discuss it without telling anyone else in the room and while participating in the bigger, unrelated conversation.

The story itself needs to be all dialogue. Outside of speech, you can identify who is speaking but don't use the space outside of your quotes to show how someone feels or what they think (no saying things like "she growled," "he glared" or "he said with a tear running down his face."). Be economical in action, too. You can describe things that move your timeline along (a meal, a school day, a party...) but try and limit it to showing the passage of time and not adding to the plot or going into detailed descriptions of the setting.

My example is below- when I finish my dialogue and publish it, I'll add it to the comments. If you decide to play, use my leadup or make up your own situation:

My leadup:

Ashley and her parents are making Thanksgiving dinner. The dinner is also meant to celebrate Ashley's acceptance to college with a full athletic scholarship. She will be the first one in her family to attend college. There is hope throughout her extended family that her degree will lead to a job to help lift the family out of economic struggles.

Ashley and her parents are in the kitchen while her very conservative grandparents wait at the table. Just before they walk into the dining room with the turkey to begin the meal, she tells her parents she's pregnant.

Please add anything you do with this prompt to the comments! Also, please let me know if you're planning to try it, even if you don't have a completed piece.