That dialogue-only writing trick from my old critique group finally clicked

Been struggling for like 2 years with scenes that just felt dead. Every draft had people standing around explaining stuff. Then last month I tried something a friend from a Meetup in Portland suggested: write the whole scene as a script with zero description, just dialogue and action lines in brackets. Force every beat to come through what people say and do. First try was garbage but after 3 attempts it sort of unlocked something. Now I do it as a rough draft for any tense conversation and it cuts my editing time by half. Anyone else ever tried stripping out all the prose just to find the actual conflict? What did you do when it fell flat?

1 comments

1 Comment

drew_chen18d ago

Ha, yeah I know exactly what you mean. I did the same thing after a workshop, and the first draft was so flat it made me want to quit. But once I started putting the emotion in the action lines, not just the words, it finally clicked for me too. Now I do it for any fight with my brother, even if I never write it down.