It’s always a good sign when a book won’t leave your head. If you’re fully absorbed in your story, ideas and possibilities will occur at the oddest of times. Commit them to paper in a notebook or type them into your phone. Then add them into the relevant part of your journal. Ideas sometimes come in the form of dialogue. Imagine the relationship that’s going to develop between Charlie and Sally. That will be played out in part in the way they talk to each other.
We’ll look at dialogue in more detail later. But you should reserve a place in your journal for imaginary conversations or simple, one-sided statements that could fit somewhere in your book. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know where. Perhaps they won’t be used at all. But it takes very little time to set down possible exchanges or a few sentences that illustrate character. This kind of thing …
Sally: ‘I want you to leave, Charlie Harrison. You’re fourteen years old. A kid. You shouldn’t be here.’
‘I am here.’
‘Why? I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t ask for you. Go away!’
He picks up his things.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
‘Going! Like you said.’
Sally sits down and looks at him.
‘I didn’t mean it. God, Charlie. You can be so childish sometimes.’
There could be something to work with there. Charlie older than he seems, and getting no credit for it. Sally thinking she’s more mature than he is, and fooling herself, though perhaps only a little. I’d put something like that in my Quotations section because it might prove a starting point from which I could begin to explore the relationship between these two. No story in there, no plot point, no narrative. Just two people speaking, trying to understand one another. Sometimes writers crave a thread, some small piece of string we can tug on hoping it might lead to something more substantial. Notes like these can provide that kind of help, just when you need it. Scribble them down in your spare moments and see what happens.