Julie Duffy's Blog, page 190
September 9, 2012
[Writing Prompt] Third Person Limited Perspective
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This week’s prompts are all about point of view and narrative voice.
The Prompt
Write a story from the third person limited POV.
Tips
“Third Person, Limited” means that, unlike yesterday, your narrator never says “I did this”, rather you talk about “he went to the door”, “He opened it.”
The ‘Limited” part means that all the judgements and assumptions, all internal thoughts are limited to those of the character through whom you are telling the story. No popping out of Dave’s head to jump across the room and tell us what Mandy is thinking as she looks at him. The only thing we’re privy to is what Dave thinks Mandy might be thinking about him.
Within this framework you can still play with the form: your limited persona can be like Nick Carraway, reporting on Jay Gatsby’s life, rather than telling us about his own adventures. You can give your limited persona the ride of her life through a whitewater canyon and let us see it all from her perspective.
Third person limited is great for short stories, because it lets us – the readers – identify with one character, and ground the story somewhere. You don’t have much space in a short story and the last thing you want is to confuse your readers (unless, of course, the whole point of your story is to confuse your readers!). Letting them get to know a character by showing their reactions to events, puts you half way to rooting for (or against) the protagonist.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
September 8, 2012
[Writing Prompt] Third Person, Omniscient perspective
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Continuing this week’s theme of POV prompts, here is today’s prompt:
Write a story from the Third Person, Omniscient perspective
This is the perspective you know from all the classics (Dickens springs to mind): the author can say anything, pop inside any (or all) character’s heads, travel backwards and forwards in time, insert herself and her own commentary onto the page…
Have some fun with this. Take an episode and tell it from one character’s perspective, then leap into another character’s head and give their read on the situation. Try out your authorial prerogatives and make a comment about what’s going on (think of that moment when a TV character turns to the camera and talks directly to us, the audience).
This can get quite complicated (which is why it works so well for novels) but give it a bash and see what you come up with.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
September 7, 2012
[Writing Prompt] First Person POV
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You’ve done it! You’ve made it to the end of the first week! I hope you’ve met or come close to your goals. But if not, this is the perfect time to sit back and figure out what went ‘wrong’, what you can learn from it and how to press forward.
And now, on to today’s prompt.
It’s easy to get stuck in a rut, writing in third-person, or first person, or inside or outside your character’s heads. So this week we’re shaking things up. Ready?
The Prompt
Write A Story Using The First Person Voice
Tips
The whole thing should be told in the “I” voice.
It should, for preference, be a story about something that happened/is happening to the person telling the story.
When writing in the first person you can never allow your narrative to stray inside another character’s head. The “I” character can speculate about what other people are thinking, but everything must come from their perspective.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
September 6, 2012
[Writing Prompt] Space
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The Prompt
Pick a spectacular or vivid interior space. Set your story in it, paying attention to the space and how it might shape your narrative.
Tips:
Perhaps your space is large and cavernous and something whispered at one end can be easily overheard at the other.
Perhaps your hero is visiting his grandmother who has a lifetime of tchotchkes cluttering every surface. How does that affect him and can he say what he came here to say?
Does your heroine need comfort, but find herself in a sterile home decorated by her acclaimed but distant architect husband?
Use a few details of an interior setting in your story today to suggest what’s going on with your characters.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
September 5, 2012
[Writing Prompt] Slow It Down
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Stories have settings, characters and action. Great! Easy. Let’s get writing!
A-hem. One of the hard parts of writing is getting the pacing of a story correct. You need to slow things down and speed things up in the right places. It may seem counterintuitive but the place to speed up is often in the set up. Readers don’t need a lot of set up. You (and they) can fill in the details as you go along. Again, oddly enough, the place to slow down can be the moment when you reach the action.
Trained by Hollywood as we are, we tend to think of ‘action’ as fast-paced, the bit where the cars come screeching down the hill, the rocket blasts off, the volcano erupts. But in a story, the ‘action’ is simply ‘the stuff the characters do in an effort to get what they want’. When your characters start taking action, that might be a flag for you to slow the reader down, tease the moment, with some details, thoughts, frame-by-frame storyboarding of the scene.
The Prompt
Take a moment, right in the heart of the action of your story, and increase the tension by slowing it wa-a-ay down with granular details.
Tips
Some examples:
Take us through every muscle that tenses as the hero prepares to run;
Take us inside a woman’s head for every random thought that flits through it between the words “will you marry me?” and her answer (“Did I leave the iron on? Oh gawd, I cannot believe I thought about that right now. Look, he’s on his knees. He’ll ruin his trousers. Focus, woman! Look at his face. That mole really needs checked out and oh no, this moment has gone on too long. Must answer. Must answer. Should I cry? I don’t think I want to cry, but it seems like the kind of thing I should do. I wish he’d stop staring at me like that…”)
Detail the painstaking preparations the surgical team makes, in silence, before the lifesaving operation.
This might not be the most successful story you ever right, but it’s a worthwhile technique to practice. You might just find a brand new tool to put in your writers’ toolkit.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
September 4, 2012
[Writing Prompt] – Time
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Hooray! Day 5 and you’re still coming back for more. Hope the writing is going well, but if not, keep plugging away at it. It’ll come. Why not read and comment on someone else’s work to inspire you?
Since this is a time-limited writing challenge I thought it was about time we wrote, well, about time.
The Prompt
Write a story that hinges in some way on time: the passage of, warping of, misperception of, freezing of, measurement of, gadgets for tracking, etc.
If you need a little inspirations on the workings of time and our obsessions with it, try this collection from the British Museum.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
September 3, 2012
[Writing Prompt] – The Death of Imagination
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Day 4 and you’re back for more. Good for you!
How’s it going? Don’t forget to check in at the forums or leave a comment on this post when you’ve written today, or if you need a little encouragement.
The Prompt
Today, write a story in which imagination and fanciful stuff like art and interpretation have been outlawed. What kind of implications would that have? Why did they do it?
(What if no-one had had the imagination to see the importance in stopping to take this picture? How would language sound without metaphors? Would we, without history, be doomed to repeat it?)
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
September 2, 2012
[Writing Prompt] – Twitter Fiction
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Day three and it’s a holiday in the US, my kids go back to school tomorrow and frankly, I think we all deserve an easy day today so…
The Prompt
Write a Twitter length story. 140 characters. That’s it.
(But watch out. It’ll take longer than you think to come up with a real story and then trim it down to 140 characters. Get some inspiration here.)
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
September 1, 2012
[Writing Prompt] Wanted
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You’re back for the second day for writing! Good for you! I’m proud of you.
The Prompt
Today, pick a character (maybe someone from your past, maybe someone you’ve been imagining for years, maybe someone you’ve written about before).
Give that character something to want. It can be as simple as wanting a place to sit down, or as grand as wanting to save the world.
Show us how much they want it, somewhere near the beginning of the story. Make it their guiding principle for every action they take, every word they say throughout the story. See how it shapes everything, and how it frees you from having to explain why they are doing what they are doing, all the time? Nice, eh?
Near the end of the story you’re going to have to decide whether we see your character get what they want, be thwarted, or limp off into the sunset still seeking after it. Show us that scene.
Go!
And when you have written your story log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
August 31, 2012
[Writing Prompt] – Saturday Morning
Welcome to StoryADay September 2012!! You’ve signed up. I’m so proud of you!
Well, while you are welcome to write whatever the heck you want today, here’s a prompt to help you out in the unlikely event that you can’t even come up with one idea 
The Prompt
Write a story set on a Saturday morning in the era during which you were a kid. It doesn’t have to be you (or a kid) in the story, but make your story capture the feel, the colors, the sounds of the time.
Don’t forget to make it a story though: something has to happen, someone has to change; we must see a beginning, a middle and an end.
Go!
And when you have written your story log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
