A writing prompt about a time traveler at a concert changed my whole approach to dialogue

Last month at the Austin Writers Workshop, someone shared a prompt about a musician from 1975 who gets transported to a modern EDM festival. That idea got me thinking about how people actually talk in different time periods, not just the slang but the rhythm. I spent three weeks rewriting a chapter of my novel where two characters are from different decades, and the feedback was way better than anything I'd written before. Has anyone else found a specific prompt that completely shifted how they handle character voices?

2 comments

2 Comments

knight.diana15d ago

Wait, you mean you actually sat down and worked through a prompt like that? I used to think prompts were just for newbies or people stuck on the first page, but last month my critique group did one where a character from the 1940s had to order coffee in a modern drive-thru. It was a joke exercise to me at first, but man, the way my character stumbled over the menu board and the cashier's slang made me realize how much I'd been writing everyone with the same flat voice. That one little exercise got me to go back and give my 1960s flower child a totally different speech pattern from my modern hacker, and now I can't unhear the difference.

kevin_carr15d ago

Did the trip through the drive-thru make you actually rewrite the flower child into third person or just tweak a few lines? I'm curious how deep the prompt took you once you started hearing that flat voice problem across all your characters. Because for me, the musician prompt forced me to cut whole scenes and rebuild them from scratch to match the new rhythm I was hearing.