Homework Assignment Six: Dialogue

Continuing the series of writing exercises inspired by Susan Breen’s The Fiction Class, today we are moving on to dialogue.  For more information on the book and this series of posts, please check out the original book review here.

Dialogue: Two people are having a conversation. It can be any two people you want, but this is the first line of dialogue: “Kiss me.”

“Kiss me.”

“No.”

“Come on, kiss me. You know you want to…” he teased.

“I do not. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m mad and I intend to stay that way for at least the better part of the day,” she replied. “And don’t tell me what to do.”

“Aw, come on, you’re not really mad. You just think you should be. But you really aren’t. So why drag this out? Just kiss me and that’ll make it all better.”

“I just ‘think I should be’ mad, huh?” she snorted. “But you don’t think I should be. You think this is all me, but it’s not. You don’t think you did anything wrong at all, do you?”

“I didn’t,” he replied in that annoyingly reasonable and self-assured tone of voice he always used at times like this. “You know I didn’t do anything mad-worthy. So let’s just stop all this nonsense. Kiss me baby, you know you want to…” he wheedled.

This time, her snort was decidedly more pronounced, and accompanied by a single, delicate raised eyebrow. “ ‘I know I want to’ he says to me. Like he has any idea what I want. Now or anytime,” she responded, almost under her breath.

“I know exactly what you want, and you want to kiss me.”

His use of That Voice was really starting to get on her nerves. “You really don’t know when to quit, do you?” she asked him.

“I’ll never quit,” he said simply. “I love you too much.”

“God, I hate when you do that. You know what? You’re a pain in my ass. You are too loud, you think you’re always right, and you lose all track of time when you’re working on that damn car. You like spray cheese in a can, can’t stand my sisters, and would cheerfully kill my dog just so you wouldn’t have to let him out to pee in the morning. Your feet stink, you have horrible taste in clothes and music, and your best friend regularly camps out on our couch. And today, when I made you breakfast – when I got up extra early to make the eggs you like and the right kind of toast and ham and sausage and bacon because you like lots of breakfast meat – you didn’t even say thank you or anything. All you did was make fun of me for not knowing how to cook “real” sausage – like I’ve ever even heard of “casings” or whatever you called them. My mother made sausage out of a box from the freezer, the way nature intended. You know I can’t cook, but I did it special, just for you, and all you could do was laugh at me. And yes, it was mad-worthy. And no, you don’t know when to quit. And yes, I love you too much too.”

And with that, she kissed him.