EXERCISE: One line

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting 13 Jan 2012

Here you go. Here's the line.

She looked at him and thought, "If that was his birthday suit, the tailor needed a better sewing machine."

Now, your job is to take that line and do something with it. You can use it to start your story, to end your story, in the middle of the tale, or wherever. You can even skip lightly past it, simply using it as a flavor hidden somewhere in the discard pile.

(If you thought the birthday suit was funny, you should have seen the party hats! :-)

But WRITE!

TECH: A quick plotting method for quick stories?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting 18 Jan 2012

I was just thinking. It seems to me one of the ways to do "quick" stories is to start at the end. What's the climactic scene going to be? Boy gets girl, Joe gets the job, Willie crawls up out of the swamp on to dry ground, the clown falls into the pot of boiling water... Whatever? Start by daydreaming about that.

No ideas? Go over to one of the collections of images, art, magazine covers, or other pictorial stimulation and do a little browsing. Pick one that catches your attention. Make that your climactic scene. Who is that in the middle? What exactly is happening to them?

Then work backwards. What's the beginning scene that goes with your ending? Girl slaps boy, the company president retires, the newspaper prints an article about the Civil War fortune lost somewhere in Crandall's Corners, the circus comes to town? Work on it. What is going to kick your protagonist into the action that eventually ends with your climactic scene?

Finally, fill in the middle with try-fail cycles. Your protagonist tries something, and fails. He builds a house out of straw, and the wind just blows it down. He builds a house out of sticks, and the wind just blows it down. Finally... You know what's coming, right? Yes, a house out of bricks!

But for the middle of your story, the try-fail cycles are the important part. And usually, at the end of the last one, as the protagonist looks up at the edge of the ring, they suddenly realize something that helps them reach that climax, that success. For a short story, two or three scenes showing the hero trying and failing is probably plenty.

So there's a "quick" story.