@libby
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PS The odd layout is courtesy of the Den. It’s not some artistic effort on my part, though it could be due to my failure to understand Den formatting. 🙂
Here’s the opening scene of a drama. 349 words
The scene is a contemporary kitchen. Magnets hold lists to the fridge. Children’s paintings are on the walls. MARCUS, 70, sits at the table, idle, and SAM, 40, stands at a counter, preparing food. Marcus wears his hair longer than Sam and has a brass bangle and a leather bracelet on one wrist.
MARCUS It’s the fault of bucket lists.
SAM It’s the fault of a puncture, Dad. A random event.
MARCUS People do too much. They don’t chill out.
SAM Naomi has taken the girls swimming, just like every Saturday. It’s not
on their bucket lists.
MARCUS Exactly. There’s other stuff they think they must do as well.
SAM Look, regular swimming is good for them and it’s normal. Will you cut up
this cucumber, please.
MARCUS [Cutting cucumber] They do ballet and football. They get asked to go to
school in fancy dress. In the woods they look up the name of everything
they see or else they’ve failed. Now Naomi and the girls are in a lay-by
waiting for a breakdown van. It’s a metaphor.
SAM It’s a breakdown.
MARCUS Wake up. Your karma’s running over your dogma. Or at least try and see
the funny side.
SAM Great. Old jokes from Nepal. Lucky you – all that time spent high on
spliffs and joss sticks. [Waves knife at Marcus] That reminds me, if you
call Naomi a chick again she’ll turn you into more pieces than that
cucumber.
MARCUS Ha! I love Freud.
SAM [Sighs]
MARCUS There’s a lot of violence in this household.
Sam’s mobile rings. The tune is ‘When You Say Nothing At All’ by Ronan Keating. He answers it.
SAM Oh, right. The girls OK?
[Woman’s voice on phone, her words indistinguishable.]
SAM Dad is helping me make supper.
[Woman’s voice again.]
SAM No. Yes. Everything’s fine. [Ends call] The breakdown man has been held
up. So when Naomi and the girls get here – finally – you need to look
sympathetic. You know, caring.
MARCUS I’ll open my arms wide and say, ‘Welcome to the Kathmandu Hippie
Hospital.’
SAM And then I’ll murder you.These are terrific @elle. Congratulations!
I’m happy to provide prompts. @Squidge has offered as well, so we could start with hers and I’ll do the next round?
Perhaps the next prompter could put their name forward during current prompt month IYSWIM.
I like @Squidge’s suggestion.
How about having both a competition as you’ve outlined it @Daedalus
and also a non-competitive prompt/challenge as a separate thing, also run every two months. It may be just me but I can see things becoming confusing if the one process variously includes a competition and a non-competition!If there’s no judging involved it shouldn’t be too burdensome for the setter.
How about every two months to start with and see if that works? I’m sympathetic to John’s suggestion of quarterly but if part of the aim is to exercise one’s writing muscles with different stories or styles then frequency seems relevant. So maybe see how we get on and go to quarterly if that’s necessary?
If we did open votes would voters give a critique of their chosen story as a way of providing some feedback? Just a thought. I don’t know if it’s practical. One Denizen’s critique, posted first, might influence later voters. Though I know we’re all rugged individuals 🙂 Dunno, I’m happy to go with the flow.
The Womagwriter blog has info on this too https://womagwriter.blogspot.com/
(a useful site if you’re thinking of submitting to women’s mags)And Della Galton blogged about it a couple of months ago on her site.
Newbury is my adopted home town, Ath. Needless to say it’s less romantic now though steam trains do pass through as I’m sure you know.
Future Sound
On the doorstep in the dark, with a glass of wine. At other times when doing this duty she’d drunk coffee. It didn’t matter, just something to nudge along the twenty minutes which might be slow if there was nothing to report.
She looked out to the lane where bare, rounded oaks stood under a sky that was clear to the stars, and no wind blew across the fields. Beyond the immediate silence, a mile away, the dual carriageway purred – lorries and cars hidden behind the hill.
Hoo-oo-ooo. A tawny owl. Success. A call to send to the survey, to add to the
records from everyone else who stood around like this in the dark. Something wild turned into data, into a picture – dots on the map – of tawnies: where they were and, by extrapolation, how they were coping. If action were needed it should be taken. Conservation.She sipped wine and watched the oaks where the call had come from. Digital information, tangible life. Tawnies, whose pellets were like ossuaries. One day she’d be ashes and dust. Not a morbid thought, really, as long as other people would hear the owls.
194 words including title
Untitled (398 words)
In the dark before dawn the phone woke me. Its light made me squint. A window was broken at the shop, said a female police officer.
I pulled on a thick jumper and skirt and, with a thumping heart, drove into the centre of town. My shop – high-quality second-hand women’s clothes – was in a small road off the high street and when I parked outside it, the door’s glass hung around a jagged hole. The alarm jangled, as did the frequent question shouted by my bank balance. Time to sell up? Glass shards on Christmas morning looked like a signal to quit.
The display window was intact. Two mannequins in wide-skirted party dresses stood just as I’d arranged them yesterday. A glazier’s van waited nearby, probably called by the police, for a quick repair job. On the pavement a handful of people stood around and inside the shop I turned off the alarm. My heart-rate settled to average.
Back outside I joined the guy from the vegetarian café. All the street’s premises had been attacked, he said, with a hammer or some such. Doors mostly. The windows were of toughened glass.
There were four empty shops. Targets for criminals. I looked at the dark windows. It was easy to be gloomy. The rise of internet shopping, the business rates weighted against us, the council’s demand that traders pay more towards the town’s Christmas lights. Now we’d been physically attacked as well.
The veggie guy was silent and sombre and I kept quiet too. Should I sell or expand into smart but used children’s clothes? That idea had come a few days earlier. Go in deeper and also get online, or get out? My talent was fashion, and it took imagination to sell clothes, to put looks together and make enticing displays. But no-one should deny internet reality.
A police officer came to ask questions and handed us incident numbers. She said the CCTV might reveal the culprit. I told her it seemed to be someone who didn’t like shops, and heard my own resignation.
Above the street the sky lightened. The doorway to a large, empty shop opposite me had a flat entrance – no step. My mind’s eye, or maybe my heart, brought along parents with prams and grandparents with stiff legs and maybe electric buggies, all going in to look at clothes arranged amid plenty of space.
Thank you for this blog Richard – and Daeds. I hadn’t read it before. I remember the Penlee disaster but had forgotten the terrible details.
I have my RNLI Christmas card from a friend who always sends one. It’s very amusing. Santa’s reindeer in crew safety helmets.
I bought my cards this year from the Shipwrecked Mariners’ Society, another seafarers’ charity worth supporting though I don’t want to detract from the RNLI!
Thank you for posting this, Philippa; it’s a great insight into your novel’s development and your own progress as a writer. What you say is both heartening and daunting. So much work! I’m really pleased you have an agent you like, one who is helping you develop the MS to an even higher level and who – by the sounds of things – shares your own ideas of what you want to achieve.
Good luck with the next stage! Or is that the current stage? Anyhow, with tackling the amendments you’ve mentioned in recent posts.
I’d guess probably not, Alan! Maybe publishing novellas is something to look forward to once one’s career is established 🙂 Though as they seem mostly to be written by big names such as Hill and Ian McEwan, you probably have to be very established.
Thank you Daeds, I really appreciate it.
I’ve found your nonfic book on the Amberley publishing site and will order a copy forthwith! It’s a while since I read a pilot biog or autobiog and am looking forward to learning about Duncan Menzies.
Sounds like you might be doing spider diagrams, Philippa – more poshly called mind mapping I think, but ‘mind mapping’ sounds too abstract for me. Anyhow, I find the technique very helpful. Completely agree with the two ‘touch points’. I need somewhere to head for – that itself is the basis of an idea. Also need to know the main theme before I start anything. Then the main characters’ names, and from there their strengths and weaknesses. Setting is very important but as I start to plan the novel after the current WIP, I’m trying to keep the setting decision open. The current WIP has sent me travelling to various locations. I’d like to avoid some of that next time round.
That’s really kind of you Daeds. I’m OK at the moment but there could well be something as I still do bits of research as I draft. I promise not to bombard you. My story deals with flying before and during WW2 but I admit I’ve kept naval aviation at arm’s length as something I don’t need to include, at least not in any detail.
You’ve already helped me with your breakdown of the movie. I looked up Coffman starters!
I too really enjoyed this, Daeds. Thank you for sharing it. I’d never have found the programme otherwise, and it does cover some of the period of my WIP. The episode was really well paced and, as you say, didn’t talk down. I learned a lot and thought all the experts were well chosen – you most of all of course. I can find documentaries frustratingly slow. And I share Jane’s view that reconstructions generally don’t add anything much! But this programme was very good.
Thanks for your notes, Raine. They are very helpful and come at a timely moment as I polish the structure of my novel in progress.
A few immediate thoughts which may not stand up to scrutiny. Athelstone wonders about the universality of such frameworks. This has always been my question too. They seem to me too rigid to allow for individual differences in people/characters. One reason I like ‘Take Off Your Pants! Outline your books for faster, better writing’ by Libbie Hawker, which Kate has mentioned elsewhere and which we’re keen on in the SE Course 2016 group, is that it’s so flexible. But maybe the apparent rigidity of other models is because the illustrations they use are often fairy tales or myths. The subtleties of character and everyday life in, say, Middlemarch or Madame Bovary, and the quietness with which information can be given so that if you’re not careful you miss it, seem pushed to the background. I’m fairly committed to realism in my writing. That’s always felt like a barrier between me and these models.
However, as I tease apart the details of my WIP (and find the yawning gaps), reading a model like this is helpful. Some aspects of the Acts can express themselves in quite subtle ways. And I’m thinking that if a part of an act isn’t there in my draft, I must ask myself why. Truth is, I could have missed something important 🙂
Whether a framework like this is adequate for depicting mental health issues, my feeling is probably yes but it all depends on how well it is applied – how the author uses their insights. I think I could fit the framework to A Line Made by Walking, by Sara Baume, which deals with depression. If anyone wants to take up the challenge of measuring text against framework do let us know if I’m right 🙂
PS I wrote this before Raine’s latest comment, all of which I agree with.
