Today, spend 10 minutes free-writing every stereotypically bad line of dialogue you can think of. These could be genre-inspired (think of the worst examples of the romance, horror, fantasy, or adventure genres, for example), from TV, from novels, from movies… Use anything you’d like. Then spend a few minutes thinking about why you consider these to be ‘bad dialogue’ and how you’d go about fixing them up, replacing them, or changing the scene to make it better.

If you can’t think of specific lines, try to remember a scene from a book or movie and read or watch that scene before doing the latter half of this exercise.

This exercise inspired by The Secret Scroll.

Many writers advocate judicious eavesdropping on others’ conversations as a means to gain inspiration. This morning I stumbled across a blog called Eavesdrop Writer that’s all about this particular form of inspiration. Today, visit that site and pick a conversation from those related on the front page. Use it as part of a longer scene, or use it to inspire one or more characters who might have uttered those bits of dialogue.