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.
Oh, that’s a good one!
The first line that came to mind: “He’s dead, Jim!” (Dr. McCoy’s favorite line, from the old Star Trek series.)
lol! And what always made that line was the incredibly overwrought voice in which the line was delivered.