Dialog -- Flash Fiction

Image from Johns Hopkins University

Jacqueline Mitchard was the Guest of Honor at the 2014 Rose State Writing Short Course in Midwest City, Oklahoma. She wrote The Deep End of the Ocean, which was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club.

She's not only a good writer, but a good teacher, too. One of the exercises she gave us to do was to write twelve lines of dialogue. Dialogue only. We could not use attributions or other narrative. It was to be an argument between two people, one of whom has a secret. The secret could not be that they were pregnant or having an affair.

From the dialogue, the reader should be able to identify the relationship of the two people, their gender, their ages, and what the secret was. These people are not arguing but here goes....


"May I sit here?"

"Sure. It's pretty full."

"Are you all right? You seem nervous. A little harried."

"My first flight. Going to ask my high school sweetheart to marry me."

"First marriage?"

"God, no. My wife and I were married forty-three years. Mary passed away two years ago."

"I'm sorry about your wife. My Bill and I are coming up on fifty-one years next month. October third."

"It was hard at first. Living alone, I mean. Not the marriage. These seats are nice. A little tight, but .... Then in June was my high school's fifty-year reunion. The bathrooms in the airport are nice. They're clean. Mary would have liked that. Do you know where the bathroom on here is?"

"There's one in the very front and one in the very back. So do you think someone should say something to someone if her slip were showing? Or, say, she noticed that someone had spinach stuck between their teeth?"

"Sure."

"What about if she noticed that a man's fly was unzipped?"

"Oh, God."

#atozchallenge