
Warm up your winter with a live online weekend workshop. | Join from anywhere in the world. | Saturday & Sunday 13–14 December 2025.
Live online workshop across two half-days to explore everything from creating distincive lively dialogue to layout and seamless attribution.
Dialogue plays a central role in making a story come alive: it creates immediacy and intimacy, roots the story in real time, and builds strong characterisation, as well as carrying the story forward.
This workshop covers multiple aspects of writing dialogue: striking the balance between actual versus "natural" speech; developing characters' voices; balancing both of those with writing snappy or powerful lines; its purpose in the story; common errors to avoid; ways of attributing speech; and the descriptions and actions that go around it. It also covers practical approaches for how to go about the actual writing, and the nuts and bolts of layout and punctuation.
You'll leave with several pieces of writing exploring characters' voices (using new characters or ones from your work in progress), new dialogue, useful strategies for the writing process, and a clear grasp of the practicalities.
What's an online workshop like? Very lively! It's held on Zoom, and packed with activities, games, discussion, and snippets of writing. For games and discussions, you're in small groups of 2–4. In the breaks and between the two days, I switch the groups around so you get a chance to work with and meet everyone.
Do I need to have a work in progress or existing characters? No, but if you do have existing characters, you can develop their dialogue. You'll also learn techniques and strategies to apply to any existing characters you have.
Do I have to share my writing? Absolutely not. In the round-off discussions, you have the chance to say how you found a particular exercise or to share what you wrote, and you can choose whichever option you're comfortable with.
Will there be a replay? No: this is a live workshop only.
Will we get notes? Yes: you'll get a booklet in the post, with everything we've covered in the workshop, and you'll also get a PDF copy of that by email immediately after the workshop.
Each half of the workshop is 2.5 hours long, with a break in the middle. Check for your time zone in the table below, for the start time.
| Time zone / Country | Workshop starts at... |
| United Kingdom | 10am |
| EDT (New York, USA) | 5am |
| CET (eg France, Spain, Germany) | 11am |
| SAST (South Africa) | 12pm |
| TRT (Turkey) | 1pm |
| IST (India) | 3:30pm |
| SST (Singapore) | 6pm |
| AWST (Perth, Australia) | 6pm |
| AEST (Brisbane, Australia) | 8pm |
| AEDT (Melbourne & Sydney, Australia) | 9pm |
or email me at megan@thewritersgreenhouse.co.uk with any questions.
Book by filling in the form below OR email me at megan@thewritersgreenhouse.co.uk. You'll get an automated email with details of how to pay.
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