You’re two weeks into a 30-day writing practice. This week’s focus — characters, dialogue, POV, voice, conflict, and the half-known world — is the architecture of the human element in fiction. Everything else serves this.
What Characters Did You Meet?
The character sketch from Day 8 often surprises writers. What they planned to write about their character and what actually emerged on the page are often different. That difference is significant. It means a character with an inner life was trying to emerge.
Look back at your sketch. Is there anything there that surprised you — a detail you didn’t plan but that feels true?
Dialogue and Subtext
The Day 9 drill — two pages of pure dialogue, no exposition — tends to expose our defaults. Some writers discover they rely heavily on action beats. Others find that without stage directions, they don’t quite know what their characters are doing. This is useful information.
What did your dialogue reveal about your characters that you hadn’t consciously intended?
Voice: The Long Game
Voice is not something you find in two weeks. It’s something you accumulate over years of writing and reading. But the mimicry exercise from Day 11 is a shortcut to awareness — it shows you the mechanical choices that produce a distinctive voice, so you can start making those choices deliberately.
Your Drill
Write a blog post summarising your Week 2 journey. Include:
- Your favourite character moment from anything you wrote this week
- One thing that challenged you (POV consistency, keeping subtext alive, raising stakes)
- One adjustment you’re making for Week 3
Reflection is practice. Writing about your writing sharpens your awareness of your own craft.
Written by
Redaksi Bacalah
Content Team — Bacalah