May 2014 Issue of The Scribblers Newsletter
Welcome to the May issue of The Scribblers. In this issue we have new writing prompts, part two of the story "Sisters" by Jamie Baker. We hope you enjoy this issue.
May Writing Prompts
(courtesy of Writers Digest)
(to be continued in the June issue)
Writing Advice, Templates, etc.
We are always looking for articles and short stories to publish, as well as suggestions for the newsletter. Please send any ideas, stories, etc. to colleen at: colleen. We'd love to see any contributions you'd like to make to The Scribblers.
If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, please email colleen with the word 'unsubscribe' in the subject line and we will remove you from our mailing list.
(courtesy of Writers Digest)
Each month we try to provide prompts for you to use. Pick one or more and write 500 to 1,000 words using the prompt/s as the basis of your story.
1. You wake up one morning to find that you are your three year old self, with your parents again, with all of the memories and experiences of your current life.
2. Your computer won’t shut down when you are getting ready to leave work at five. Instead, it is looping a message, and then attempts to tell you something. What is your computer doing?
3. Daydreaming on your way to work, you get into a car accident. Frustrated because you will be late for an important meeting, you curse and yell as you get out of the car. When you go to confront the other driver, you find out it is your boss.
Target character and conflict with a handy checklist
From The Writer magazine
To write a compelling story, you must thwart your character's desire. These questions will keep you on the right track.
By Gregory Martin | Published: December 29, 2009
By Gregory Martin | Published: December 29, 2009
Your character wants something badly. Your reader wants your character to get what he wants. Your job is to disappoint both of them.
Ironic? Sure. Narratives are driven by desire: 1) the character’s desire, 2) the reader’s desire that the character succeeds, or at least, the reader’s desire to see what happens to all this yearning, and 3) the author’s desire to thwart both the character and the reader.
It’s this thwarting of desire that beginning writers need to cultivate. It doesn’t come naturally. Far too often, writers are unwilling to let their characters make mistakes and get themselves into trouble that has both cost and consequence for which the story holds them accountable. In stories with this kind of trouble, the protagonists are too passive, too coddled by their author, to make the kind of graceless mistakes born of the yearning and desperation that create good fiction.
You, the writer, can be as poised as you want, act with aplomb, reserve, tact, polish. But your characters can’t. Your task is to put your characters in true dilemmas, where they make hard choices and don’t always make good decisions. These situations, and these choices, ought to be open to the reader’s moral imagination, allowing the reader to participate in the life of the story—so that the reader has to ask: What would I do?
The following checklist is a craft guide to characterization and conflict. It’s not a crutch or simple remedy. It’s asking a lot of you and your story. It should make you feel slightly despairing. It’s designed to help your draft become more of a story, less a rough assemblage of unsuspenseful, incoherent narrative-ish moments.
The checklist is also a form of triage. It helps you to focus on necessary elements, without which your draft is not a story. The movement from an early draft to a middle draft is predicated entirely on focusing on major flaws. Your job is to stop the bleeding where the bleeding is most profuse. Don’t worry about hangnails. Too many beginning writers think that tinkering around with syntax and punctuation constitutes revision. Not at the early stages it doesn’t. Steven Koch, in his great book The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, says, “Don’t polish a mess.”
Some students find applying a rubric like this “constraining”; they feel less intuitive and spontaneous. It’ssupposed to feel constraining. Form is a container, a constrainer; it gives shape to what was amorphous and lacking. You need it because your intuition and spontaneity are not enough to render meaning to readers.
1. What is your character’s ground situation? The ground situation, according to John Barth, is the unstable but static (tense but unchanging) situation prior to whatever comes along and kicks the story into gear.
2. What does your character want?
3. Why? What are your characters’ motivations? Why do they want what they want? Often this is related in some meaningful way to the answer to question No. 4.
4. What is your character’s problem—rooted not in the situation but in the character? Put another way: What is your character’s existential dilemma? Dumbo’s problem is not his big ears. His problem is how he feels about his ears.
5. What’s in the way of your character getting what he or she wants?
6. What happens to make this static situation dynamic? I sometimes call this the story’s trigger. Things were like this and this, and then one day … a wig turned up in the garbage … a blind man came to spend the night.
7. How does this trigger change the nature of the ground situation? How does this trigger present new obstacles that weren’t there before?
8. Are these obstacles formidable? How? (Each one needs to be formidable.)
9. Is there complication or rising action? Are these obstacles of a different kind? (They can’t just be, in essence, the same obstacle but in a sequence.)
10. How is the story a record of choices? Are these choices true dilemmas, open to the reader’s moral imagination?
11. Describe your character’s reversal. In order for your story to be a story, your character must, in some way, change. No one grabs your collar and says, “You’ve got to listen to what happened to me. After this happened, I was the same as I was before.” That’s not a story.
12. How is this reversal both related to a) action—to something that happens in the story —and b) a choice the character made, and how is it related to some kind of c) recognition on her part?
13. Do your characters get what they want? They shouldn’t, at least not in some meaningful way.
Are these questions hard to answer without first having a draft finished—without a beginning, middle and ending? Yes, so write your draft first. How do you write something that has a beginning, middle and end, without first knowing all the subtle, profound complexities? Here’s how. Write down the basic sequence of events. This happened. And then this happened. And then this happened. And then this happened. Until you’re done.
Then, apply the checklist. Revise accordingly. Then, go back and make it subtle and profound.
Gregory Martin is the author of the memoir Mountain City, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. He teaches at the University of New Mexico. This article first appeared in The New Writer’s Handbook 2007: A Practical Anthology of Best Advice for Your Craft and Career, edited by Philip Martin, from Scarletta Press.
Sisters, Part 2
by Jamie Baker
Christmas day was both better and worse than a normal
day. My mom is really big on tradition
and doing things the right way, which usually means her way. My first brother, Jeff, was born when I was
five and at his first Christmas, mom decided that we would always open our presents
on Christmas morning and I should be the one to pass them around. That tradition lasts until my other brother,
Mike, came along four years after Jeff.
At the next Christmas Jeff pestered to be allowed to open one present on
Christmas Eve. So the now the tradition
is, everybody gets to pick one present to open the night before, and I pass all
the rest the next morning.
My brothers woke me up while it was still dark, Jeff
whispering in my ear to wake up while Mike switched the ceiling light on and
off. So that was the beginning of the
bad part of the day. I made it worse by
screaming at them to get out of my room.
My alarm clock said it was only 5 o’clock. Then I heard mom and dad’s bedroom door
open. Mike flipped the switch, the room
went dark again, and they ran into each other, tripping and fighting each
other, trying to get back into their own room.
I heard dad’s slippers slapping past my room and I went back to sleep.
It seemed like it was only five minutes before they were
back again, but the light was coming in from the window and my clock said 7
o’clock, so I got up. Mom and dad were
in the kitchen, making coffee and pouring the orange juice. We always ate breakfast after the presents
were opened, so we took our cups and glasses in to the living room and I
started reading the tags and passing out the presents. I also make sure everyone has one and wait
while those are opened and fussed over before I pass out the next batch. I tried to stretch out the best part of the
day, but it was all over by 9 o’clock. My brothers ruined breakfast by trying to
steal each other’s French toast and Mike knocked over Jeff’s milk. That really set my mom off. Things got worse in the afternoon, when they started bouncing on the couch to launch themselves across the room. Jeff bounced in the wrong direction, banging
into the TV, knocking off of its stand. The
picture tube broke with a sound like a thousand light bulbs smashing. Then the Christmas tree fell over.
The next few days dragged by. The library was closed all week. I did laundry whenever there was enough for a
load. I checked Ginger and Marci’s
plants. I rode my bike over to the school,
but that was sad and stupid. Why would I
miss a place that I hated so much? One
of my Christmas presents was a new record player to replace the one that Mike
had dropped over the railing, watching it blast apart on the concrete
yard. I had a few records that I played
in my room, but if I turned up the volume loud enough to matter, mom banged on
the door and screamed at me to turn off that blatty music. Whatever blatty is. Then it got really cold and rained for two
days straight, so I was stuck in the house.
So were my brothers and with no TV they were worse than ever. I
finally stuffed my ears with cotton and resorted to doing school work.
The day before Ginger and Marci were supposed to come back,
dad asked me if I wanted to go to a store with him. The boys starting screaming that they wanted
to go too, but dad said no. In the car,
I asked dad why we’re going shopping when we just got a bunch of socks and
stuff for Christmas. He said it was a
surprise. He took the freeway into
Oakland and we went to a big discount furniture store and he bought a new TV. Then we went to Woolworth’s and ate hot dogs. It was kind of fun. I think we were both sad to go back home,
back to the music hater and the TV destroyers.
An even better part of the day was that night at
dinner. The boys were quiet for once,
their mouths full of mashed potatoes and baked ham, when mom made the big
announcement.
“Tomorrow night is New Year’s Eve. Your father and I are going out for the
evening. We deserve a night out.”
Jeff opened his mouth, gluey with potatoes, but dad cut him
off.
“No. The night is just for your mother and me. Carol, you’ll be in charge. We’ll leave phone numbers where we can be
reached and Mrs. Duncan, the apartment manager, knows we’ll be out. She said she’d check on you and you can call
her if you have any problems.”
I almost cheered. My parents hadn’t been out for a long
time, not since dad got laid off, so I was glad for them. My parents having a night out, plus the new
TV on top of all the Christmas stuff, made me think things were getting back to
normal. Even better, I’d been worrying
about how I was going to get out of the house for Ginger and Marci’s
party. Mom would never let me go if she
knew about it, but since she wouldn’t be here, she wouldn’t know. I’d still be sneaking, but at least it would
be easier.
Throughout the month I receive a lot of emails, newsletters, etc. regarding writing and I keep them in order to pass them along in the hope that someone reading this newsletter will find them helpful or at least interesting. This is a list of websites that you may find helpful in your writing:
8 MS Word Templates That Help You Brainstorm & Mind Map Your Ideas Quickly:
GET ME WRITING
Get it finished, Get it published (eventually), but most of all, Get Writing:
How to Write a Children's Story
Sample Children's Stories, Writing Your Own Children's Story:
How to Write a Short Story
Sample Short StoryWriting a Short StoryEditing a Short Story:
Manuscript and Cover Letter Formatting for Short Story Submissions:
Proper Manuscript Format, Short Story Format (includes a free plagiarism checker):
Write Your Ass Off
Because sometimes, you just need a kick in the pants:
And Finally...
We are always looking for articles and short stories to publish, as well as suggestions for the newsletter. Please send any ideas, stories, etc. to colleen at: colleen. We'd love to see any contributions you'd like to make to The Scribblers.
If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, please email colleen with the word 'unsubscribe' in the subject line and we will remove you from our mailing list.
