Kate

The Den is eating its private groups! I wonder why…

Yep – me too.

Also, I had a private hidden group to mess about with text formatting that seems to have disappeared.

Oh, this packs a punch. The add-on sentences say so much, and the voice is great.

Wow, this is so rich @hilary. So much there, so many hints and glimpses and twinges of pain and longing and sadness. There’s a sort of yearning behind of these lines that breaks my heart a bit. Such powerful fragments.

Amazing piece, Raine. A wonderful example of writing a character through the eyes of another one. Very sad.

I wonder if he will end up getting away with the misbehaviour? Interesting piece.

Great contrast between the two letters, Bella. And yes – what is buried within – that’s the most interesting bit. Very clever.

An amazing piece of writing, Kaz. Very powerful. Strong imagery. Brilliant.

Oh, except the Dad drawing. That’s from a character in one of my stories.

I enjoyed doing this. I didn’t really think about the Burroway while I was writing – it was more a free-writing exercise. And it’s not in the voice of any character I’m already writing. Just came out of nowhere.

Liking this: All good characters are created round, but some are created rounder than others.

Hello @JaneShuff
VERY late to this, but I’m trying to do a bit of a catch up with class 2 before I get on to class 3. I LOVED meeting Dipsy in the initial passage and then reading your questionnaire about her. I agree about not needing to answer al the questions, but they are great prompts.
Anyway, thanks for posting.

Oh my lord @raine this is magnificent. Heartfelt and raw but with real beauty too (I don’t think you can help your writing being beautiful, frankly). That images of the monsters under the sea and the line about undoing her smile as if it had never been, the line about her joys being taken away – joy in his kindness, moments of softness. So vivid,…[Read more]

ooh, very interesting angle @sandradavies.I like using a secondary character to shed light on the story and this is a very vivid reveal – of both the son and father. The impression I got of the father was a sadistic bully who asserts power and enjoys it. The lines about the Duncans implies a family of note of some kind – or maybe notoriety? these…[Read more]

So very interesting @bellam, especially as your explanations show just how much you have buried below the surface of the letters. Very well done, both of them.

I too got a sense of a unreliable narrator in the first letter – do we believe her? I doubted her – and in the second one you have nailed the young, inexperienced voice and that line…[Read more]

thank you all! It was a surprise for me how it took off.

Nope, Raine, it does not 🙂

I’m trying (struggling) to write a man who, the more I get to know him, the more I realise he has psychopathic tendencies, from the hiding in plain sight/joy of transgression PoV. Born into (8th generation) family business but wants to forge his own path (while holding on to respectability) so secretly deals in…[Read more]

Thanks @sandradavies and @bellam both. It’s interesting – as I was writing this, I was thinking that it didn’t really tell me anything about the ‘inner lives’ of either Abigail or John. But in hindsight, perhaps it does. More about John though than Abigail, I think?

And yes, I think she needed to get out fast, and I think she did. She felt quite…[Read more]