Sep. 25th, 2009

[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Original posting 15 Sept 2009

This will sound kind of odd. But basically, what I suggest you do is think about a movie or a TV story or something like that, and pull one scene out of that. You could also do what I was doing that prompted me to write this exercise -- changing channels idly, I hit one of the anime -- kid's cartoons -- and paused for a moment to see what was going on. The heroines (I could tell, they had the fancy clothes) were taking a child home... and went around the corner, and there is the home, but it's destroyed. Smoking wreck. And the evil monster dropped into the path...

At about that point, I went ahead and turned off the TV, but I was thinking about that scene. Star Wars did it, and...

So I stopped and wrote myself a note. Write a scene with the protagonists taking the child/apprentice home, only to find the home destroyed, friends and family dead or gone or changed, and (optionally) the attack of the bad guys. Or maybe having them disappear, so that the child/apprentice and protagonists have to chase them is better?

I do this with movies on airplane flights, or even sometimes when my wife is watching something. Pull out those scenes, simplify them down to the bone, and then write them again with my own twists, settings, and characterizations for practice and fun...

Go ahead. Write.

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