EXERCISE: fried scruples

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Thu, 05 Apr 2001 11:17:19 -0400

OK, here is the challenge...

Take a number from 1 to 5.  Go ahead, pick whichever one you like.

(Got one?  No, don't read any further until you have picked your number.  Take your time, I'll wait.  So... have you got your number now?)

See what you have picked:

1. Your fiance/e discovers that s/he has a terminal illness that can drag on indefinitely.  Do you break the engagement?  What happens?
2. Someone extends his friendship but you aren't interested.  Later you learn that he is a legal wizard.  You need free advice desperately and don't know anyone else.  Do you call him?
3. At lunch, your colleagues are running down the work of another colleague who is absent.  Do you speak up for the absent co-worker?
4. A house painter asks why you didn't hire him.  The only problem is his lack of personal hygiene.  Do you tell him?
5. Your neighbor in an adjacent apartment building insists on doing yoga nude, in full view.  Do you complain to your neighbor's landlady?

There you go.  A little matter of scruples, ethics, and similar diversions, courtesy of the game "A Question of Scruples."

Now, your task, should you choose to accept it, is to consider this ethical thorniness as the root or seed of a story.

How do you engorge this beginning into a tale of tawdriness?

What kind of thinking do you do, how do you develop the characters, how do you plot the actions that will show the theme, how do you...

Oh, yes, go ahead and develop your story.  And while you're doing that, keep track of how your own thinking works.

Then, if you would, let's discuss both the fine process that took you from a scrupular dilemma to the tale that howled, and also the tale in all its toldness.

Got it?  Two results: one, the story.  Two, the story of the story, or how I wrote my tale.

Sound interesting?  Then let the words crackle.