If These Walls Could Talk

I’ve been busy working on another e-book related to writing—and always am intrigued by prompts or how writers can trick themselves into producing something we wouldn’t normally think of.

There is an on-line journal asking for submissions of 375 words maximum—but here’s the catch:

dialogue only.

From the website guidelines:

Dialogual publishes quality dialogue-only stories.

Any genre, except erotica.

However, we do not take anything that has been accepted before, or that has appeared on blogs or similar sites. In other words, we want fresh material. We are looking for stories that say something, but we are not looking for one-liners, two-liners or whatever else-liners. That's only a small punchline best left for something else.

Also, refrain from sending things that tell, such as "Janice said," or "Brian advised."

Basically, anything that is not dialogue-only will not be accepted, regardless of how good it may be. 

We publish two to four times a month, on Thursdays. 

You can send up to 3 pieces. Times New Roman, 12, double spaces, no indents. doc, docx, rtf, odt.

Simultaneous submissions are in okay.

There are also a few themed months. Valentine's February, April's Jokers, Sci-Fi September, Halloween October, and Christmas December.

So take the dialogue challenge. Can you write a story or scene using only dialogue? This kind of challenge is also helpful in establishing “voice”—something essential to strong narrative stories.

Also my writing group partner Claudia Martinez is doing a give-away for her new book, Pig Park.

Here are the details on how to win a copy--the official release date is September 16th. But the give-away is only