The Sweet Escape

Lesson #6– we’re halfway through! OMG!– focuses the class on the use of scene and sequel. The purpose of scene is to move the story along, and contains three elements: Goal, Conflict, and Disaster. The sequel is the followup– how your protagonist reacts to the scene: Emotion, Thought, Decision, Action. Every piece of fiction has scene and sequel and as our instructor points, out the best works have a great balance of the two.

Our assignment for this lesson was to take a story or a scene and identify the elements of scene and sequel– are they included? Were they used welll?  Could the scene or sequel be beefed with dialogue or action? Does this scene move the plot along?  After identifying the elements, does the scene read better? Like professional writing?

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Advanced Fiction Writing Lesson #5: Setting, Theme, Detail, Research

Tonight’s lesson was relatively easy, in a way. Generally about setting and how it sets the mood and helps the theme along. And what helps the setting along is use of detail and doing your research. I have declared myself to be the Queen of Research. Not really. I just alwys need a realistic standpoint to come from, so I’ll look something up in a hot second.

So back to setting and detail– it’s something I think I am pretty good at, but not offhand and not all the time.  And sometimes some well known authors irk their readers with overuse of descriptionary (is that a word? Is now) terms. I was just talking with a classmate about this and said that my mom cannot STAND to read Toni Morrison. She says she doesn’t want to read about all the hues of the flowers in bloom— get to the darn story!! I think a well written story, novel, memoir, is one that tells you just enough to paint the picture, and no more. I personally like to leave a little mystery.

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A short written for the linebyline prompt community:

I kind of cheated this week. I started this forever ago and abandoned it, and tonight I was looking through some old stuff and it popped up, so I thought I would revise and add to it and try to fit this week’s line in it because– well hell. That is a hard line. So here we go.

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Her eyes slowly adjusted to the pre-dawn darkness and objects about the room started to take shape. Her head shifted slightly toward the source of a mysterious sound in the room, the one that startled her awake and made her heart race. No matter how often this happened, she’d never get used to him being there at random times during the night.

In a few minutes, he would drop his arm from where it was usually slung casually across his forehead, roll over, swing his legs to the floor, and quietly, gently, get out of the bed. She would hear sounds of him padding about the room, barefoot, looking for the clothes he had flung hours earlier in a path to the bed. Then sounds of him putting them on—thick denim being yanked onto muscular, hairy legs, a loud zipper, a button. A shirt being pulled over his head, searching in the dark for the arm holes. Socks, then a dip in the bed as he sat to pull his shoes on. He would pick up his sweatshirt, the one that zipped up the front, and then tiptoe around to her side of the bed, lean down and brush dry, chapped lips across her cheek, tap her rump and whisper ‘thanks’ when her eyes fluttered open briefly. Then he would stealthily move about the house, checking for his wallet, jingling his keys, and walk out. She would hear him test the lock a few times to make sure she was locked inside. He always tested the lock.

[read the rest at the archive]