Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Guest Choreographer Challenge--So You Think You Can Write...write...write


Please welcome our first guest writing choreographer--Mia St. Michaels

Read through her challenge then take writing action! Send your completed challenges to the goals guru. They'll be posted anonomously for everyone's reading pleasure.

Deadline for this challenge is September 9th. The goals guru will call for votes for your favorite when the page report request is made. Popular vote will choose the overall favorite and the choreographer will also choose the piece that best fulfills the challenge.

Put on your writing shoes, Heartlandians. Show us you know you can write! (Not a Heartlandian? Ioin us in this challenge and stretch your writing muscles!)





The Challenge:

One of the many things setting can do for your story is to intensify reader involvement—make the reader care—and making the reader care is the most important hook you want to establish.
* Using familiar things engages emotions
* Sight, sound, taste and feel engage senses

On page 47 in the chapter titled Plain Facts About Feelings, Swain says:
How do you bring a setting to life?
The answer, of course, lies in the human animal himself. His world is a sensory world—a world of green grass and white houses…purring kittens and thundering truck…Chanel No. 5 and curling wood smoke…fresh cold orange juice and hot crisp bacon…silk’s rich smoothness and the harsh grit of volcanic ash.

So you build your story world of these same sensory impressions—the seen, the heard, the smelled, the touched, the tasted. Emphasis is on the vivid image and the impactful figure of speech. Then, with analogies, you link it all to the familiar, even if it costs you an extra word or two or three. It will be worth it. Someone who’s never smelled the lunar pits now may come to realize that they have a parallel tin the acrid, sulfurous, flaming smoke that belches from the shaft of an exploding mine.

Finally, and perhaps the most important of all, you consider the frame of reference in which this world exists. Here is where you relates all that has gone before to you reference point, your focal character. You do this by presenting your material subjectively, as your focal character receives it.

Your challenge is to take one or more characters from your current work in progress and write a scene I set up for you. Take them to a cemetery. This is not the day of the funeral. Time has passed since the deceased person’s death—how much time is up to you. Consider these elements:

What is the weather like? Briefly describe weather and how it affects your character or compares/contrasts to their emotions.
What sounds can be heard?
Watch your character react and decide whose grave that is.
Describe the headstone or lack of.
Is the grave well tended or neglected? How does s/he feel about that?
Describe your character’s emotions.

Now add this thread: Your character and the dead person shared a secret. What is it?

Try to fill at least three double-spaced pages with this scene. Use a memory. If another person is accompanying your main character, use dialogue (but don’t have them saying things they already know just to get the facts across to your reader).

This is an exercise in describing and using setting to reveal something about your character, so….

Did you learn anything about your character that you didn’t know previously?
Did you learn anything useful that you will use in your story?

1 comment:

  1. wow! Great challenge! I think I know which character... now... to write.

    ReplyDelete