Peter Mangiaracina.

Writing Dialogues treats a dialogue as a way to explore verbal interactions in a controlled environment. The central concepts are personal agendas, collaboration, negotiation, conflict, and conflict resolution. Conflict makes the situation harder to solve and creates a wider range of emotions and language.

The lesson also covers cast, settings, suggested situations, professional dialogue format, and the final writing and performance assignment. The dialogue should contain a conflict that the characters resolve through collaboration and negotiation.

Important points

• Dialogues explore verbal interactions in a controlled environment.
• Personal agendas can clash and create conflict.
• Negotiation and collaboration resolve the conflict.
• Possible characters include doctors, patients, nurses, drug representatives, and administrators.
• Possible settings include meetings, telephone calls, interviews, patient visits, drug-trial discussions, and conference questions and answers.
• A professional dialogue identifies location, description, characters, dialogue, stage directions, and character descriptions.
• The assignment requires at least two pages and at least two characters.
• The writer performs one character and directs the other actors.

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