2025 New Year's writing resolution: spend 10 minutes a day getting words on the page.

Today's 10-minute writing exercise is focused on dialogue! We're using alternative verbs, and as usual your anonymish host is writing along. She's having flashbacks to seventh grade, when she learned the exact opposite of the current conventional wisdom. Styles change! Tools are forever.

This is a no-homework podcast! Every episode, we build in ten minutes of time for ourselves to do the assignment, and the assignment is always to write write write.

Our dialogue exercises this month, with a couple of exceptions, will focus on the mechanics of dialogue writing. The subject of the conversation is less important than the effect of specific mechanistic choices or constraints that we'll be playing with.

For today's ten-minute writing exercise:

It is the current conventional wisdom (and style) to use only said or asked as the verbs in dialogue tags, with very rare exceptions.

Write a conversation in which every dialogue tag uses a new and different verb.

Our themes this month are:

• Love in all its forms
• Dialogue
• Comedy Writing Step by Step by Gene Perret

We will also write a complete work of flash fiction together in a week from Feb 17 - Feb 23. No pre-work needed, and as always, zero homework outside of our ten minutes a day. This month we'll use Dan Harmon's story circles method to plan out our stories

You can write to our daily writing prompt, but you could also:

• journal
• brainstorm
• write for your work in progress

All that matters is that you do write and you don't cheat and you don't stop writing until the music comes in.