Dialogue Skills: Borrowing TV Writing Tools for Fiction Writers

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Great TV characters are often remembered for their outstanding dialogue, whether it’s a catchphrase, a speech, or their ability to banter like it’s their business. In this class, we’re going to study script excerpts from recent shows to identity what TV writers do that we can borrow for our own writing. We’ll cover the overall approach these writers have toward the amount of dialogue in a script, how to make characters sound distinctive, how to weave in subtext, and how to write things that sound “naturalistic.” Then we'll do some in-class exercises to put these tools to work in your own projects.

Jesaka Long (they/she) is a queer, non-binary writer, editor, and educator currently living in Colorado. In their teaching, Jesaka focuses on helping students find the stories only they can tell, develop their specific perspective, and figure out how they want to express it on the page. They have been teaching writers of all ages for more than ten years at places including Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Denver School of the Arts, the Loft, and libraries throughout Colorado. Jesaka’s short fiction has won awards and been published in Hunger Mountain and Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly Review. Their screenplays have ranked in competitions at film festivals in Austin, Atlanta, and Portland. “Inklings,” their TV pilot script was a finalist in the first SeriesFest Storytellers Competition. Jesaka earned an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Dialogue Skills: Borrowing TV Writing Tools for Fiction Writers

Saturday Sep 27 2025, 10:00 AM - 11:15 AM
Zoom (register for link)
United States

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