Dialog moves a narrative along in fiction, personal essay, memoir and poetry, too. Playing with ways to experiment with dialog will help you build your dexterity with this aspect of the writing craft. And playing with the prompts might have you creating some new writing you’ll want to expand.

1. Write a conversation between three people–one who wants to go somewhere particular and two who do not. Instead of talking directly about their thought process and reasons, let them discuss options over a task they are doing — quilting or yard work or cooking or fixing a car or fishing, for instance. Imagine the faces and gestures and movements of each character as they speak. Make sure the reader can see those, too, as the speakers talk.
2. Write a preachy or expository piece of dialog from one character to another–a diatribe on why drugs are bad, or why strangers are scary, or how the legal system works, for instance. Now write a scene where the reader can figure the information out from the action the characters take and the natural things they say to one another.
3. Write a scene in which a character speaks one kind of belief and attitude but acts another — i.e. a father who is short and impatient with his children by look and gesture but talking to a hospice volunteer about kindness.
4. People often listen only to themselves and talk past one another. They are in conversation just waiting for the other to finish so they can resume talking about themselves. Write dialog in which this is happening for both speakers–say a husband is building a case for his ability as a real estate agent and his wife is building her case for how he is a slacker.
5. People often don’t really answer everything another says. Write a dialog in which one speaker addresses another and the other skips on to a different, perhaps tangentially connected, subject or memory or thought.
6. Write a dialog between two people in love — notice how they repeat each other’s words and finish each other’s sentence and extend each other’s thoughts.
7. Write playground dialog between children. Include make-believe and the adult world as seen through a child’s eyes.
8. Write dialog in which one character does most of the talking and the other character’s thoughts are reported. One is external dialog and the other is internal dialog.
9. Write an extended inner dialog for a character in a tight jam. What is he seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling and what does he think his options are?
10. Write a dialog in which one character speaks to another and the narrator summarizes what the other character is saying.
11. Write a dialog in one-said-the-other said format: “The hills are alive with music,” Kathy said. “The birds are the best of the instruments,” Ken said. Keep this up for at least six lines. Then go back and vary the pattern: “The hills are alive with music,” Kathy said. “The birds,” Ken said adamantly, “are the best of the instruments.” Kathy didn’t skip a beat, “Don’t you hear the crickets, too?” And so on.
12. Record talk you recently overheard somewhere. Write out what you think the tone, diction, and conversational style say about this person.
13. Write dialog in the dialect of a non-native English speaker. Accomplish the dialect through word order and the sprinkling in of foreign words or pronunciations.
14. Choose two characters who would have immediate friction: a policeman and a burglar, a wife who knows her husband is cheating and the husband, two women dating the same man, a father who comes home to find his son going through his financial files, for instance. Write the argument they have.
15. Write a dialog in which one character disappoints another character — a mother reneges on taking her young children to the swimming pool, a teacher gives a test after saying she wouldn’t, a merchant doesn’t have the shoes he said he did in the back room, for instance.
16. Write one side of a phone conversation from someone who is receiving difficult news.
17. Write one side of a phone conversation from someone who is giving bad news.
18. Write one side of a phone conversation from someone who is receiving thrilling news.
19. Write one side of phone conversation from someone offering exciting news.
20. Write a conversation in which one party is jealous of another and tries hard but unsuccessfully to reveal the jealousy.

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Make a point to record snippets of conversation and pronouncements you find interesting, amusing or upsetting. You’ll find you start paying exquisite attention to the way people talk and surprise one another, conceal things from one another, let others in and shut them out. All of this is the stuff of interesting writing.