Dialogue

We’re going to reconstruct a dialogue from a magazine article, and transform it into something that would work in a novel. What you need to do for this exercise, is find an article where there are quotes from an interview subject or subjects. Just a short paragraph will do, and ideally there’ll be some descriptive or filler words from the interviewer. For teaching purposes, I’ll be using an example from The Weekend Australian Magazine, September 18-19, 2021, by Ricky French. French interviews writer John Marsden. I’m going to use the dialogue and description around it to create something that involves the reader in the co-construction of the scene. It will not be a rendition of the interview, but rather a fictional conversation based on fragments of a real dialogue.